Midnight Survivor

What lands hardest in this opening stretch is Ruby herself — a child who tucks her hair into a cap to sneak into her brother's boys' club, decks a kid twice her size for knocking her comic books to the ground, and later stares her own mother down mid-exorcism until Zelia's "pale face looked just like the mask I wore in school." That's a vivid, specific image, and it does real character work: we understand in one beat why her mother both fears and can't fully control her. Ribeiro doesn't sand down her younger self into a sympathetic martyr — Ruby slams doors, calls her cousin's frog metaphor back at her with "the frog eventually ends up under a truck," and tells a furious church deacon "I am the Devil" with her chin up. That's a child who has decided, early, that she'd rather be feared than small, and the book lets that cost show later in her isolation.

The adult framing device — Ruby confronting her mother years later, asking flatly "Do you still think I'm that person today?" — pays off the childhood scenes without over-explaining them. And small supporting figures get real texture too: Maritza at the store, dripping cookies and wisdom ("Being a parent does not make us perfect"); Kathleen's Irish-accented tenderness; Pedro's quiet, machete-wielding steadiness against Zelia's volcanic rule-keeping. These aren't cardboard cutouts serving a moral — they contradict themselves the way real family does. For a memoir built on the collision of faith, magick, and a hard childhood, that's the throughline that will keep readers turning pages: not the theology, but Ruby.