Highwire Moon Book

In this powerful, great-hearted story, Susan Straight takes us back to the multiracial area of southern California that is, in Faulkner’s phrase, her “postage stamp of soil.” As in her highly acclaimed earlier novels, she has created a world of richly imagined characters struggling to retain their dignity and humanity in an often brutal environment. Serafina is a young Mexican Indian girl desperate to leave her impoverished existence in Oaxaca. Emigrating illegally to California, adrift on her own, she becomes involved with Larry Foley, a feckless trucker and occasional speed freak. When a baby daughter, Elvia, is born, Serafina cares for her tenderly until the day she is forcibly separated from her child and deported. Elvia, who has known nothing but sheltering love, is thrust into foster care. Eventually reclaimed by her father, she shares his chaotic life until she becomes pregnant at fifteen. In a frenzy of fear and despair, she is Tlled with an overwhelming need to find her mother. Her quest leads her into the world of migrant farm labor, where bitter toil, violence, and sexual predation make clear how little has changed since the Joad family harvested the grapes of wrath. With unfailing compassion and profound emotional truth, HIGHWIRE MOON takes us into a hidden universe of love, pain, and stubborn hope. It is sure to appeal to Susan Straight’s ardent admirers — almost a cult readership now — and to find many new ones.

Publishers Weekly

There's much to admire in Straight's (I Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots) heartrending, take-no-prisoners fourth novel, which returns to the fictional California town of Rio Seco to expose the horrific dangers facing migrant farm workers and explore how families are created and sustained. The author's dramatic powers are best displayed in the novel's harrowing opening scene, in which a Mexican Indian mother, Serafina, is separated from her toddler daughter, Elvia, and forcibly taken back to Mexico without her. Fifteen years later, Elvia, a tough-talking pregnant teenager, fights her way out of crippling poverty, drug abuse and dysfunction to find her mother. Elvia's travels are interlaced with Serafina's simultaneous agonizing trek back from Mexico. Straight portrays this world in imagery that can be quite poetic: "California was full of saints, all dead, the green freeway signs like their tombstones." But the language can also be unconvincing, as when Serafina prays for the Virgin Mary to "wrap an invisible blanket of bubbles around Elvia, each dimple of air full of exhaled love." The novel relies on some hard-to-swallow plot points: it's difficult to believe that Serafina could have stayed away so long, or that she and Elvia would set out to look for each other at the exact same time. As a novelist, Straight is unswervingly focused on the intersections of love, race, class and violence; despite its flaws, this is an engrossing demonstration of her dedication to that vision. (Aug. 8) Forecast: Some reviewers have been uncomfortable with Straight's focus, as a white writer, on black characters. Sales of her last two books were disappointing, but there is a chance thatthis one which takes off in a slightly different direction (though it embraces a similar social agenda) may do better. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.