Synopses & Reviews
With a new introduction by the author
Finalist for the National Book Award: The story of a young mother deported and separated from her child, and the pairs efforts to locate each other years later
Highwire Moon narrates the journeys of a young mother and daughter divided. Serafina is a Mexican-Indian scraping by in Southern California; detained by immigration officials, she tragically lacks the English to tell them that Elvia, her three-year-old, is resting in a nearby car. After her deportation, Serafina tries in vain to return to the States, while Elvia must survive several foster homes, later to be reclaimed by her father. By the time Elvia is fifteen, shes pregnant and surrounded by drugs. She decides to find her mother across the border—at the very same time that Serafina goes in search of her.
Highwire Moon is gritty and affecting, a family saga that couldnt be of more relevance today.
Review
“Her gallery of misfits reminds one of Flannery OConnors—but with a dash of sympathy and human goodness.” —
The Washington Post Book World“An eye-opener of a novel, a road map to the real California . . . [Straight] turns headlines into poetry.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Packed with the kind of detail about people, places and emotions that transport the reader to a different world.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“One of Americas gutsiest writers . . . a polyglot with an astonishing ear for how people really talk in places we hardly remember they are living.” —The Baltimore Sun
“Heartrending.” —Publishers Weekly
Synopsis
A young Mexican mother struggles to reconnect with her child in America--a "heartrending, take-no-prisoners" novel and National Book Award finalist (Publishers Weekly). As an undocumented migrant worker, Serafina has scratched together a life for herself and her three-year-old daughter, Elvia, in the unglamorous shadows of Hollywood--until the morning she is apprehended by immigration officials and deported, separated from her terrified daughter who is crouched under the dashboard of their car.
By the time Elvia is fifteen, she has survived numerous foster homes and a father ill-suited to raising a tough-talking, pregnant young woman. Fighting for herself and her unborn child, she decides to search for her long-lost mother. Meanwhile, Serafina is making her way back across the Mexican border to find her little girl after all these years.
Hailed by the New York Times Book Review as "an eye-opener of a novel, a road map to the real California," Susan Straight "turns headlines into poetry." As with all her work, Straight's fourth novel presents a vital and unsparing vision of America.
About the Author
Susan Straight has published eight novels. Her most recent, Between Heaven and Here, is the final book in the Rio Seco trilogy. Take One Candle Light a Room was named one of the best books of 2010 by the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Kirkus Reviews, and A Million Nightingales was a finalist for the 2006 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her novel Highwire Moon was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award. “The Golden Gopher” won the 2008 Edgar Award for Best Mystery Story. Her stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Salon, Harpers, McSweeneys Quarterly Concern, the Believer, Zoetrope: All-Story, Black Clock, and elsewhere. Straight has been awarded the Lannan Prize for Fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Gold Medal for Fiction from the Commonwealth Club of California. She is distinguished professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. She was born in Riverside, California, where she lives with her family, whose history is featured on susanstraight.com.