Highwire Moon: A Novel

Susan Straight

Aug 2013 · Open Road Media

About this ebook

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.

Ratings and reviews

This book is so good! I'm absolutely in love with it. It flows very well and I love the style. Also it's very easy to get into and to imagine. 😀

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, Harper’s, McSweeney’s 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.