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From the author of A Million Nightingales (“a writer of exceptional gifts and grace”—Joyce Carol Oates) comes a luminous new novel about the forces that tear families apart and the ties that bind them together.
Fantine Antoine is a travel writer, a profession that keeps her happily away from her Southern California home. When she returns to mark the fifth anniversary of the murder of her closest childhood friend, Glorette, she finds herself pulled into the tumultuous life of Glorette’s twenty-two-year-old son—and Fantine’s godson—Victor. After getting involved in a shooting, Victor has fled to New Orleans. Together with her father, Fantine follows Victor, determined to help him avoid the criminal future that he suddenly seems destined for.
Fantine’s own fate will be altered on this journey as well: her father will reveal the wrenching secrets of his past, and she will be compelled to question the most essential choices she’s made in her life. As they cross from California to the heart of Louisiana, all three characters will come face-to-face with the issues of race that beset them: Fantine, whose light skin has allowed her a kind of invisibility; her father, who grew up in the Jim Crow South and has tried to guard his family against that world; and Victor, whose fall into violence mirrors the path of so many other young black men. For Fantine, finding Victor could offer them both a way to face the past and decide between different futures.
Powerful and moving, Take One Candle Light a Room illuminates the intricacies of human connection and the ways in which we find a place for ourselves within our families and the world.
Straight's (A Million Nightingales) newest heroine, FX Antoine, keeps a distance from her family, her past, and even her present. Her one tie to home is her godson Victor, the child of her murdered best friend, whose involvement in a shooting sends him careening off the college path and potentially straight into a life of crime. He flees to Louisiana, where FX grew up, and is followed by her and her father, who wrestles with family secrets of his own. Their pursuit of Victor is marred by complications, not the least of which is the looming Hurricane Katrina, putting them all at risk. Straight again places readers in a rich and alien culture, a mélange of misfits and outlaws. FX is a detached protagonist, resisting her own family and culture, and readers will share her outsider's viewpoint. Straight's love of language is embedded in every page, though often at the expense of plot, and parts of the puzzle remain obscure in an otherwise rich and absorbing story. (Oct.)
| Price | Condition | Delivery | Seller | Action |
| $99.99 | Digital |
| WonderClub |
Thomas Bento
reviewed Take One Candle Light a Room on January 22, 2011
Take One Candle Light a Room
Now I have come to the end of reading Susan Straight, at least for now. This is her most recent novel, just released in October, 2010, but I am pretty sure she has not come to the end of her stories yet.
Take One Candle Light A Room is almost a sequel to A Million Nightingales. The main character is known as FX when she is out in the world publishing her pieces in travel magazines. At home in Rio Seco, she is Fantine, named after an ancestor who lived with Moinette in Louisiana. The Antoine family, living amidst the orange groves of southern California, knows their history all the way back to Moinette's mother, especially because many of that slave woman's descendants are of mixed race, due to the history of rape perpetrated on black women by white men.
FX is light-skinned enough herself to pass as Italian or Hawaiian. She is the one, as there often is in Susan Straight's novels, who is different from the rest of her family. She is the one who left and whom her mother and sisters will never forgive for doing so.
When this complicated woman returns home to participate in the fifth anniversary remembrance of the murder of Glorette, the best friend of her childhood, she finds that Glorette's son Victor has disappeared. FX has no children of her own. She doesn't even have a boyfriend but Victor is her godson and means more to her than anyone else in the world. He'd been riding with two gangsta friends that weekend and involved in a shooting which left one person dead and one wounded.
So begins a desperate hunt for Victor, taking Fantine and her father across the country on Interstate 10 all the way to New Orleans. As Fantine wrestles with her professional aspirations set against her love for Victor, the long history of more than eight generations of this family comes to light.
Over three hundred pages of road trip, tension and suspense was excruciating. The wonder is that the author could sustain it through about nine hours of reading. That level of anxiety and stress is usually only found in two hours of an action/thriller film. A further wonder is her explication of why race, violence and drugs plague so many young Americans.
Susan Straight never preaches, her tone is never strident and she refrains from cheap emotional tricks. Once again she put me into the lives of the characters, their homes and cars and neighborhoods, as well as into their hearts and minds. She just tells the story but reading it is as close as one can come to living someone else's life. And yet, every book is different from the last. What a great reading adventure I have had. I recommend it!
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