Highwire Moon

Rating:
Summary: Powerful novel
Review: Susan Straight's novels based in her imaginary Rio Seco have provided some of the best portraits and stories of contemporary life on the edge. Her latest novel is no disappointment. I found Highwire Moon to be a compelling, riveting read, especially in terms of her insights into the lives of today's immigrants from Mexico. Read it, and pass it on!

Rating:
Summary: Page turning
Review: The book is haunting, dealing with the struggles of a girl who survived the foster care system and lives with her biological father, who tries hard to raise her but s struggling through life as a drug addict. The main character tries to learn about her biological mother who left her when she was a small child.
The setting is in the California desert and Mexico.

Rating:
Summary: A Powerful Read
Review: This is a riveting novel of a mother and daughter's search for each other through time, distance and dreams. The book describes in heartbreaking detail the lives of undocumented farm workers, foster children, and others on the margins of our society. But the story is balanced by the presence throughout of the moving spiritual rituals that sustain many of its characters. To read Susan Straight's novels is to enter a world unique in American fiction.

Rating:
Summary: This Is Bleak Stuff Folks ...
Review: This is a vivid, intense, and ultimately overwrought book, about a Mexican Indian girl who is forcibly separated from her three year old daughter. Susan Straight has a whole lot to say about the plight of the illegal immigrant and those that live on the fringes of our society. She plunges the reader into the horrors of migrant labor with examples of violence, prevalent drug use, and sexual predation. Her characters are great-hearted people, with big dreams, but instead of focusing on the plot (how about some interaction between the main characters?!?!), Susan Straight instead chooses to hit us over the head with her thoughts on love, race, and class.

Rating:
Summary: Riveting and Compulsively Readable
Review: WOW! I liked Straight's earlier novel, I Been in Sorrow's Kitchen, so I bought this right away when I saw it on the shelf. It's the story of Serafina, an indigenious Mexican woman, and Elvia, the half-American daughter she was forced to leave behind during an immigration raid. The two spend years searching for each other throught Mexico and Southern California. Straight does a great job of portraying the region's beauty and heartbreak. The characters are so flawed, yet so compelling, and the pacing and suspense makes this hard to put down. Warning, though: really packs an emotional whallop. A must for mothers and Steinbeck-lovers. Why hasn't Oprah picked this yet?