The Book: Mecca
Copies available in the Moorpark College Library. See the One Campus, One Book display adjacent to the Reference Desk. Those copies are available for 3-week checkout with auto-renew for another three weeks. In a pinch, there are two copies of Mecca on Reserve (ask at the Circulation Desk) available for overnight checkout.
Mecca by Call Number: OCOB Display PS 3569 .T6795 M43 2022ISBN: 9780374604516Publication Date: 2022-03-15"A wide and deep view of a dynamic, multiethnic Southern California . . . Susan Straight is an essential voice in American writing and in writing of the West." --The New York Times Book Review A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and an NPR Staff Pick. One of The Washington Post's 21 Books to Read this Summer. Named a Most Anticipated Book of March 2022 by the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and Alta. From the National Book Award finalist Susan Straight, Mecca is a stunning epic tracing the intertwined lives of native Californians fighting for life and land Johnny Frías has California in his blood. A descendant of the state's Indigenous people and Mexican settlers, he has Southern California's forgotten towns and canyons in his soul. He spends his days as a highway patrolman pulling over speeders, ignoring their racist insults, and pushing past the trauma of his rookie year, when he killed a man assaulting a young woman named Bunny, who ran from the scene, leaving Johnny without a witness. But like the Santa Ana winds that every year bring the risk of fire, Johnny's moment of action twenty years ago sparked a slow-burning chain of connections that unites a vibrant, complex cast of characters in ways they never see coming. In Mecca, the celebrated novelist Susan Straight crafts an unforgettable American epic, examining race, history, family, and destiny through the interlocking stories of a group of native Californians all gasping for air. With sensitivity, furor, and a cinematic scope that captures California in all its injustice, history, and glory, she tells a story of the American West through the eyes of the people who built it--and continue to sustain it. As the stakes get higher and the intertwined characters in Mecca slam against barrier after barrier, they find that when push comes to shove, it's always better to push back.
More By Susan Straight
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In the Country of Women by
One of NPR's Best Books of the Year "Straight's memoir is a lyric social history of her multiracial clan in Riverside that explores the bonds of love and survival that bind them, with a particular emphasis on the women's stories . . . The aftereffect of all these disparate stories juxtaposed in a single epic is remarkable. Its resonance lingers for days after reading." --San Francisco Chronicle In the Country of Women is a valuable social history and a personal narrative that reads like a love song to America and indomitable women. In inland Southern California, near the desert and the Mexican border, Susan Straight, a self-proclaimed book nerd, and Dwayne Sims, an African American basketball player, started dating in high school. After college, they married and drove to Amherst, Massachusetts, where Straight met her teacher and mentor, James Baldwin, who encouraged her to write. Once back in Riverside, at driveway barbecues and fish fries with the large, close-knit Sims family, Straight--and eventually her three daughters--heard for decades the stories of Dwayne's female ancestors. Some women escaped violence in post-slavery Tennessee, some escaped murder in Jim Crow Mississippi, and some fled abusive men. Straight's mother-in-law, Alberta Sims, is the descendant at the heart of this memoir. Susan's family, too, reflects the hardship and resilience of women pushing onward--from Switzerland, Canada, and the Colorado Rockies to California. A Pakistani word, biraderi, is one Straight uses to define a complex system of kinship and clan--those who become your family. An entire community helped raise her daughters. Of her three girls, now grown and working in museums and the entertainment industry, Straight writes, "The daughters of our ancestors carry in their blood at least three continents. We are not about borders. We are about love and survival." "Certain books give off the sense that you won't want them to end, so splendid the writing, so lyrical the stories. Such is the case with Southern California novelist Susan Straight's new memoir, In the Country of Women . . . Her vibrant pages are filled with people of churned-together blood culled from scattered immigrants and native peoples, indomitable women and their babies. Yet they never succumb . . . Straight gives us permission to remember what went before with passion and attachment." --Los Angeles Times
Call Number: OCOB Display PS 3569 .T6795 Z46 2019ISBN: 9781948226226Publication Date: 2019-08-06
Between Heaven and Here by
No one's ever fallen out of love with Glorette Picard, with her black waterfall of hair and skin gold as a mothwing. Fine as wine and just my kind, they call her. Gilt, they call her. Still, when they drive by the alley where she works every night, they call her other things. Now Glorette's body is found in that alley, folded up in a shopping cart. Before the dry creek swells and the orange groves blossom, Rio Seco, California, will bury the most beautiful woman who ever walked its streets. In Susan Straight's most gracefully told novel, the heart of the Inland Empire is broken wide open to reveal the loyalty, the dark history, and the love that runs in the veins of a hidden America. Between Heaven and Here is gripping in its compassion? a portrait that ?ought to be recognized as a national artistic treasure" (The Boston Globe).
Call Number: OCOB Display PS 3569 .T6795 B48 2012ISBN: 9781938073816Publication Date: 2013-12-31
A Million Nightingales by
From National Book Award finalist Susan Straight comes a haunting historical novel about a Louisiana slave girl's perilous journey to freedom.Daughter of an African mother and a white father she never knew, Moinette is a house maid on a plantation south of New Orleans. At fourteen she is sold, separated from her mother without a chance to say goodbye. Bright, imaginative and well aware of everything she risks, Moinette at once begins to prepare for an opportunity to escape. Inspired by a true story, A Million Nightingales portrays Moinette’s experience–and the treacherous world she must navigate–with uncommon richness, intricacy, and drama.
Call Number: OCOB Display PS 3569 .T6795 M55 2007ISBN: 9781400095599Publication Date: 2007-05-08
Take One Candle Light a Room by
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.
Call Number: OCOB Display PS 3569 .T6795 T35 2010ISBN: 9780307379146Publication Date: 2010-10-12
Highwire Moon by
A young Mexican mother struggles to reconnect with her child in America--a "heartrending, take-no-prisoners" novel (Publishers Weekly) and National Book Award finalist. A vital and unsparing vision of America from National Book Award finalistSusan Straight. At three years old, Elvia was placed in foster care when hermother, Serafina, an undocumented migrant worker, was deported. Twelveyears later, Serafina risks everything to return to the United States and the daughter she was forced to abandon.
Call Number: OCOB Display PS 3569 .T6795 H544 2019ISBN: 9781640093591Publication Date: 2019-10-22
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