Mecca: A Novel
(Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read)

Susan Straight. (2022). Mecca: A Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Susan Straight. 2022. Mecca: A Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Susan Straight, Mecca: A Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022.

Susan Straight. Mecca: A Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022.

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1. • value: racism
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10. • value: latino
11. • value: National Book Award
12. • value: Women Writers
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16. • value: in the country of women author

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1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Straight, Susan
   • bioText: Susan Straight is the author of several novels, including the national bestseller Highwire Moon, a finalist for the National Book Award, and A Million Nightingales, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, as well as the memoir In the Country of Women, named a best book of 2019 by NPR and Real Simple. She is the recipient of the Edgar Award for Best Short Story, the O. Henry Prize, the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and her stories and essays have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian, Granta, Harper's, and elsewhere. She was born and continues to live in Riverside, California, with her family, where she serves as Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside.
   • name: Susan Straight

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fullDescription

One of The Washington Post's Ten Best Books of 2022. Finalist for the 2022 Kirkus Prize and the 2023 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. One of the New York Times' 10 Best California Books of 2022 and one of NPR's Best Books of 2022. A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice.

"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
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.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Caribbean Fragoza, The New York Times Book Review
   • content:

     "Straight showcases intricate intersections of personal and familial histories to create 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, and Mecca is a meaningful addition to this canon. She heralds important ways of storytelling that shift how we see the land and one another."

2. • premium: False
   • source: Ron Charles, The Washington Post
   • content: "A terrifically engaging novel about a network of people related by blood, love and duty . . . what might be most impressive about this novel is how large it becomes without ever feeling bloated by extraneous plotlines or too neatly sewn up . . . Remarkably, the most persistent impression here is not one of suffering but of determined survival, even triumph."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Bethanne Patrick, Los Angeles Times
   • content: "[Straight] succeeds mightily in writing a new novel to be savored by not just Californians but all Americans who've been around the last couple of years . . . Mecca is a hymn of love and lamentation."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Karen Grigsby Bates, NPR
   • content: "A fine set of interwoven tales from her California . . . [Straight's] writing is both luminous and sharp and told, as usual, through richly layered family histories."
5. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     October 1, 2021
     

     Descended from both the Indigenous people and the Spanish colonizers of California, Johnny Frias feels completely at home in its small town, canyons, and byways, and his story as unwound here by the sharp-minded, lush-voiced, multi-award-winning Straight creates a portrait of the state itself. Johnny works for the California Highway Patrol, ticketing speeders whose racist insults he brushes aside and trying to forget an incident from his rookie year. At the time, he killed a man who was assaulting a young woman, and two decades hence the consequences of his actions are exploding. With a 50,000-copy first printing.

     Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

6. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from November 22, 2021
     Straight’s ambitious return to fiction (after the memoir In the Country of Women) takes an empathetic look at members of Southern California’s Latinx community who face the dangers of fires, earthquakes, ICE raids, police brutality, and “la corona.” There’s Johnny Frias, a 40-year-old motorcycle cop who lives with the secret knowledge of the rapist he killed and buried in Bee Canyon 20 years earlier; Ximena, a young undocumented Mexican woman working as a maid at a desert spa, who comes across a newborn infant abandoned there; Merry Jordan, a neonatal nurse whose teenage son, Tenerife, lies brain dead in the hospital where she works, having been shot by a cop; Matelasse Rodrigue, a harried mother of two young children, whose husband, Reynaldo, has left them for a new life practicing capoeira; and Mrs. Bunny, a mysterious wealthy woman living in Los Angeles’s Los Feliz neighborhood, whose fate is improbably intertwined with those of Johnny and Ximena. The author’s love of the Inland Empire and its people shines through on every page, and there is a Didionesque quality to Straight’s depiction of SoCal characters living in the shadow of prejudice and poverty, but in place of Didion’s free-floating anomie there is fierce compassion. This evokes the best California fiction.

7. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from March 15, 2022
     Is Susan Straight the bard of Southern California literature? In her eighth novel--she has also written a memoir and a collection of linked stories as well as a book for young readers--the author stakes her claim. A sweeping and kaleidoscopic work, it begins (how could it not?) on the freeway, "a Thursday in October," a highway patrol officer named Johnny Frias tells us. "Santa Ana winds, ninety-four degrees. Fire weather. People were three layers of pissed off. Everyone hated Thursday. Wednesday was hump day, but Thursday was when people drove like they wanted to kill each other." Johnny is one of several protagonists in Straight's novel, which flows from first to third person and life to life as if to embody the instability of the region it evokes. The notion of Southern California as elusive, beset by wind and traffic, is hardly a new one; it infuses the work of writers such as Joan Didion and Carolyn See. Straight, however, is operating in a different register, one attuned less to Los Angeles than to the sprawl that surrounds it, extending into the Inland Empire and the Coachella Valley. Her focus, as it has long been, is on people to whom the stereotypes of sun and speed and reinvention do not apply. Here, that means not only Johnny, but also Ximena, an undocumented domestic worker, and Matelasse, whose husband leaves her with two young sons not long before the Covid-19 pandemic begins. "Black acres of sandy field," Straight describes the landscape, "the corral where his grandfather's horses and the bull named Coalmine used to live. Then the arroyo, and the foothills." This is a novel that pushes back against the clich�s of Southern California to reveal the complex human territory underneath.

     COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

popularity

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One of The Washington Post's Ten Best Books of 2022. Finalist for the 2022 Kirkus Prize and the 2023 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. One of the New York Times' 10 Best California Books of 2022 and one of NPR's Best Books of 2022. A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice.

"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
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...

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   • description: Fiction / World Literature / American / 21st Century