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Highwire Moon
Susan Straight. Anchor: 2002 (paperback). ISBN: 0385722613. 320 pages.
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The New York Times Book Review called this 2001 National Book Award Finalist "an eye-opener of a novel, a road map to the real California." Highwire Moon is an immigrant story that yanks a population of overlooked characters out from under the rock that camouflages their presence for most of us; it's also a mother-daughter novel that turns that genre on its ear.
An unfortunate accident earns illegal migrant worker Serafina a trip back to her home country of Mexico, and an even more unfortunate oversight sends her back without her three-year-old daughter. Twelve years later, armed with only a pair of silver barrettes that once belonged to her missing child, Serafina sets off on a dangerous journey across the border to find Elvia. Elvia, for her part, now fifteen and pregnant, determines to find the mother who so inexplicably abandoned her, who left her to the care of a series of foster parents and a faltering biological father. As Seraphina and Elvia track across an increasingly hazardous landscape of people desperate enough to try anything twice, we are treated to a portrait of individual determination and family love that burns a passage from the page to our core. Straight steadily resists any temptation to play this story for cheap sensation or easy tears, and the result is gutsy, gritty, and ultimately uplifting. As seen on Ellen on Seven.
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