Highwire Moon

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.

KLIATT

Elvia remembered seeing the "highwire moon" from Sandy Narlette's laundry room window, the moon that sat on the telephone wire, balanced, seemingly able from that point to alter its course and move in an entirely different direction. This image remained in Elvia's mind long after she left Sandy's foster home to return to her father, who loved her but could not provide her with a stable home life. Elvia's mother, Serafina Estrella Soloria-Mendez, is a Mixteca Indian. Working briefly in the Angeles Linen plant, she was rescued by Larry Foley, a deliveryman, when "la migra," the immigration police, came to round up illegal aliens. He cared for her and eventually their daughter, Elvia, was born. When Elvia was three, Serafina was seized in a church parking lot by "la migra" and returned to Mexico without her daughter, who was sleeping in the nearby car. Larry and Elvia never knew what happened to her. When Elvia becomes pregnant, she is obsessed by the need to know whether her mother had abandoned her. The recurring image of the "highwire moon" represents the hope that she, like the moon, may have the ability to alter the course of her life. Suspense builds in the novel as mother and daughter independently search for each other on both sides of the border. This novel provides a sobering glimpse of the poverty, abuse and fear that define the daily life of illegal aliens and of the mutual strength and support evident in Indian and Mexican families that sustain them. Some language and dialogue is coarse, but appropriate to the realistic portrayal of the subculture of disaffected youth, those low on the economic scale, who are enslaved by drugs. A National Book Award Finalist, this is anexcellent book for adults and teens. KLIATT Codes: SA—Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2001, Doubleday, Anchor, 306p., Allison

Library Journal

Illegal alien Serafina has found some measure of happiness until she is forcibly separated from beloved daughter Elvia and sent back to Mexico. Eventually, the teenaged Elvia will go there to hunt her out. From the award-winning author of I Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

School Library Journal

Adult/High School-A gritty portrait of poor Mexican immigrants and of low-life drug abusers in LA, softened by the boundless love of a mother for her daughter and a daughter determined to find her mother. Teens will encounter brutality and suffering here, but also a realistic picture of the struggles of illegal immigrants, of the horrors of migrant labor, and of a southern California far from the glitter and wealth of Hollywood. Serafina, an illegal alien who speaks only Mixtec, is caught by police in the car she attempts to drive to a market to buy food. Her three-year-old daughter, Elvia, crouched under the dashboard, is overlooked as Serafina screams in her language. Serafina is deported, and Elvia is put in foster care, eventually with Sandy, a loving foster mother. Unluckily, her father, a trucker and occasional drug user, finds her and her life becomes a series of motel rooms. At 15, a pregnant Elvia takes off in her father's pickup truck to find her mother; at the same time, Serafina finally finds the money and the courage to reenter California in search of her daughter. Elvia eventually finds a refuge with Sandy, but Serafina's life is a series of migrant farm camps in the company of Florencio, who loves her and tries to protect her. With Sandy's help, the story ends with the promise of reconciliation.-Molly Connally, Kings Park Library, Fairfax County, VA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Straight (I Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots, 1992, etc.) paints a bleak yet not hopeless landscape as a young girl and her mother, separated by happenstance 12 years earlier, search for each other among the down-and-out of southern California. When immigration authorities pick up Mexican-Indian Serafina, the 18-year-old lacks enough English to explain that her 3-year-old daughter, Elvia, is asleep in a car parked nearby. Elvia, the child of Serafina and an itinerant Anglo worker, passes through a series of foster homes before her long-term placement with a nurturing surrogate mother. She's happily ensconced there when her father Larry, himself the product of foster homes, shows up and reclaims her. Larry's undeniably redeeming characteristic is his sense of parental responsibility; he spent years tracking Elvia down. But he is also a loser and speed-freak. Elvia becomes involved with Michael, an orphaned Native American whose sweet dreaminess masks his dangerous attraction to speed and hallucinogens. Pregnant at 15 and afraid to tell her father, Elvia's longing for her birth mother, always simmering, boils over. She steals Larry's truck to look for Serafina, or at least for clues to why Serafina abandoned her. Meanwhile, Serafina has never lost hope of reuniting with her daughter. When first deported, she immediately tries to sneak back across the border but is badly beaten and returns to her hometown in southern Mexico, where filial obligation demands she remain to care for her sick mother. Once her mother dies and Serafina's brother sends money from California, she endures extreme hardship to cross back into the States. In the town where they had lived as a familyyears before, Elvia and Serafina conduct separate searches for each other. Almost crossing paths, each finds familial love in unexpected places. Strong physical detail and a carefully rendered cast mostly overcome long stretches of talky description and occasional slips into sentimentality.