Highwire Moon: A Novel - Softcover

Straight, Susan

3.69

582 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1480419850 ISBN 13: 9781480419858

Publisher: Open Road Media, 2013

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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.

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From the Inside Flap:

Serafina is an illegal migrant worker living in California when the police catch her and send her back to Mexico-without her three-year old daughter. Twelve years later, with a pair of silver barrettes her only tangible memory of Elvia, Serafina begins a harrowing journey back across the border to find her daughter. At the same time Elvia, now fifteen and pregnant, resolves to track her mother down. They travel a landscape populated by desperately poor migrants moving from harvest to harvest, truckers living hand-to-mouth in seedy motels, and lost children in foster homes. But the memory of love inspires hope, and out of these women's losses-and their determination-Straight has crafted a deeply moving tale of the meaning of home and family.

From the Back Cover:

“Her gallery of misfits reminds one of Flannery O’Connor’s–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 America’s gutsiest writers ... a polyglot with an astonishing ear for how people really talk in places we hardly remember they are living.” — The Baltimore Sun

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