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Between Heaven and Here
In August in Rio Seco, California, the ground is too hard to bury a body. But Glorette Picard is dead, and across the canal, out in the orange groves, they’ll gather shovels and pickaxes and soak the dirt until they can lay her coffin down. First, someone needs to find her son Victor, who memorizes SAT words to avoid the guys selling rock, and someone needs to tell her uncle Enrique, who will be the one to hunt down her killer, and someone needs to brush out her perfect crown of hair and paint her cracked toenails. As the residents of this dry-creek town prepare to bury their own, it becomes clear that Glorette’s life and death are deeply entangled with the dark history of the city and the untouchable beauty that, finally, killed her.
234 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2012
10 people are currently reading
600 people want to read
About the author
Susan Straight
45 books422 followersSusan Straight's newest novel is "Between Heaven and Here." It is the last in the Rio Seco Trilogy, which began with "A Million Nightingales" and "Take One Candle Light a Room." She has published eight novels, a novel for young readers and a children's book. She has also written essays and articles for numerous national publications, including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Nation and Harper's Magazine, and is a frequent contributor to NPR and Salon.com.
Her story "Mines," first published in Zoetrope All Story, was included in Best American Short Stories 2003. She won a Lannan Literary Award in 2007. She won a 2008 Edgar Allan Poe Award for her short story "The Golden Gopher."
She is a Professor at the University of California, Riverside and lives in Riverside, California.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 58 reviews
June 27, 2021
After reading Bee Canyon and The Golden Gopher by Susan Straight, both highlights of Orange County Noir and Los Angeles Noir, I not only reached for a novel by her but ran after it. Published in 2012 by McSweeney's Books, Between Heaven and Here is no more a novel of dames, death or deceit than her short stories, the latter of which focuses on the same fictional, impoverished Inland Empire community of Rio Seco as her novel. Poverty and drug use force Straight's characters to live moment to moment, as do the ghosts they carry. Unfortunately, for lack of a compelling narrative, I struggled to maintain interest in this novel.
The story is organized around the death of Glorette Picard, a light-skinned beauty with a perfect bun of long hair and long coveted by the men of Rio Seco. Glorette never recovered from the disappearance of a Detroit musician who fathered her son Victor when she was seventeen. Eighteen years later, she was living eviction to eviction, addicted to crack cocaine and prostituting herself in an alley that connects a taqueria to the video store where Sidney Chabert works. He discovers her body stuffed into a shopping cart and as much for his love for Glorette as his paranoia of being accused of killing her, alerts her people instead of the police.
Glorette's people live on a Creole enclave in the orange groves outside of town, having fled here from their native Sarrat, Louisiana a generation ago. Her "uncle" Enrique Antoine worked the land and long ago murdered the white man who lorded over the farm and refused to sell it. His sons Lafayette and Rey question Sidney, while Glorette's father, a widower named Gustave, finds nothing on his estranged daughter's body to suggest she was murdered. Glorette's son Victor, a high school senior intent on escaping Rio Seco through a college education, comes to live with his grandfather. Everyone is haunted: by poverty, by unrequited love, by regrets, sometimes all of the above.
The birds were finished. Enrique smelled the damp earth from where he'd irrigated earlier. Not a love song, his own daughter Fantine had told Glorette, when they were small, sitting in his truck cab with him one night when they'd come out to get tools. He's not telling the other birds he loves them. He's telling them this is their territory and they better not come in. That's what my science teacher said. You should have come to class.
I couldn't, Glorette said softly. I couldn't go in there. And his daughter cocked her head and frowned at Glorette.
What does that mean? You couldn't? You couldn't walk into class and sit next to me like you were supposed to? Because you think you're too fine?
Glorette got out of the truck then, in the dark, and ran into the trees. He knew immediately that someone was bothering Glorette in the science class.
When Fantine said she was going away to the east for college, and Marie-Claire cried, Fantine said, Resistance is futile, maman. Enrique could barely understand what his own daughter said half the time, but she said that clearly, and explained it, and it was close enough to French that Enrique knew it meant there was no need to fight.
Every time I read John Steinbeck and log onto Goodreads, I ask myself where the Steinbecks are in fiction today, not that I don't enjoy reading about robots or attorneys or wizards, but the families marginalized by poverty, substance abuse or violence often seem to be marginalized in fiction too. Susan Straight deserves a lot of credit for embracing Steinbeck's legacy, both with her compassion for the poor as well as her prose, which is vivid, often haunting and always honest. There were a number of reasons I wasn't able to connect with the material and can't recommend this novel.
Straight isn't as interested in telling a story as she is in weaving memories together. I can open the book to any page and find lovely writing, but after a certain point, I wanted that to stop. I wanted a story that moved me forward. The novel isn't about what happened or is about to happen so much as what happened years ago. Characters come across as shells of themselves hypnotized by the past: kids, parents, grandparents, everyone. Not only is this not how I believe people function, worse, it makes for seriously tedious reading. Stories need both darkness and light, seriousness and brevity, to come across as compelling and genuinely reflect the human condition. This one is entirely too solemn.
I had difficulty keeping track of who was related to who as well. In addition to there being too many characters for a novel this short (roughly 78,000 words), Straight's characters also had a sameness to them that wasn't related to where they lived. She introduces a new character, has him or her thinking about the past, dredging up a memory, and it wasn't easy keeping track of who was despairing and who wasn't because everyone was despairing. I just didn't believe that so many people would spend so much time in reflective sadness and even if I could, I wouldn't want to read about it. The ending does end on a note of hope, but it feels almost factory mandated for safety purposes.
Length: 78,007 words
The story is organized around the death of Glorette Picard, a light-skinned beauty with a perfect bun of long hair and long coveted by the men of Rio Seco. Glorette never recovered from the disappearance of a Detroit musician who fathered her son Victor when she was seventeen. Eighteen years later, she was living eviction to eviction, addicted to crack cocaine and prostituting herself in an alley that connects a taqueria to the video store where Sidney Chabert works. He discovers her body stuffed into a shopping cart and as much for his love for Glorette as his paranoia of being accused of killing her, alerts her people instead of the police.
Glorette's people live on a Creole enclave in the orange groves outside of town, having fled here from their native Sarrat, Louisiana a generation ago. Her "uncle" Enrique Antoine worked the land and long ago murdered the white man who lorded over the farm and refused to sell it. His sons Lafayette and Rey question Sidney, while Glorette's father, a widower named Gustave, finds nothing on his estranged daughter's body to suggest she was murdered. Glorette's son Victor, a high school senior intent on escaping Rio Seco through a college education, comes to live with his grandfather. Everyone is haunted: by poverty, by unrequited love, by regrets, sometimes all of the above.
The birds were finished. Enrique smelled the damp earth from where he'd irrigated earlier. Not a love song, his own daughter Fantine had told Glorette, when they were small, sitting in his truck cab with him one night when they'd come out to get tools. He's not telling the other birds he loves them. He's telling them this is their territory and they better not come in. That's what my science teacher said. You should have come to class.
I couldn't, Glorette said softly. I couldn't go in there. And his daughter cocked her head and frowned at Glorette.
What does that mean? You couldn't? You couldn't walk into class and sit next to me like you were supposed to? Because you think you're too fine?
Glorette got out of the truck then, in the dark, and ran into the trees. He knew immediately that someone was bothering Glorette in the science class.
When Fantine said she was going away to the east for college, and Marie-Claire cried, Fantine said, Resistance is futile, maman. Enrique could barely understand what his own daughter said half the time, but she said that clearly, and explained it, and it was close enough to French that Enrique knew it meant there was no need to fight.
Every time I read John Steinbeck and log onto Goodreads, I ask myself where the Steinbecks are in fiction today, not that I don't enjoy reading about robots or attorneys or wizards, but the families marginalized by poverty, substance abuse or violence often seem to be marginalized in fiction too. Susan Straight deserves a lot of credit for embracing Steinbeck's legacy, both with her compassion for the poor as well as her prose, which is vivid, often haunting and always honest. There were a number of reasons I wasn't able to connect with the material and can't recommend this novel.
Straight isn't as interested in telling a story as she is in weaving memories together. I can open the book to any page and find lovely writing, but after a certain point, I wanted that to stop. I wanted a story that moved me forward. The novel isn't about what happened or is about to happen so much as what happened years ago. Characters come across as shells of themselves hypnotized by the past: kids, parents, grandparents, everyone. Not only is this not how I believe people function, worse, it makes for seriously tedious reading. Stories need both darkness and light, seriousness and brevity, to come across as compelling and genuinely reflect the human condition. This one is entirely too solemn.
I had difficulty keeping track of who was related to who as well. In addition to there being too many characters for a novel this short (roughly 78,000 words), Straight's characters also had a sameness to them that wasn't related to where they lived. She introduces a new character, has him or her thinking about the past, dredging up a memory, and it wasn't easy keeping track of who was despairing and who wasn't because everyone was despairing. I just didn't believe that so many people would spend so much time in reflective sadness and even if I could, I wouldn't want to read about it. The ending does end on a note of hope, but it feels almost factory mandated for safety purposes.
Length: 78,007 words
September 24, 2012
http://www.dallasnews.com/entertainme...
Between Heaven and Here
Susan Straight
(McSweeney’s, $22)
By JENNY SHANK Special Contributor
Published: 20 September 2012 06:56 PM
Susan Straight is like that rare teacher who sees only the best in the worst-behaved kid in the class. Although Riverside, Calif., turns up in its share of places-to-avoid lists, Straight has built a loving literary monument to her hometown in a series of award-winning novels set in Rio Seco, her fictional stand-in for Riverside, and she writes about the least of its residents with uncommon soul and grace.
Between Heaven and Here continues the story of a Rio Seco family with roots in Louisiana Creole culture that Straight explored in A Million Nightingales (2006) and Take One Candle Light a Room (2010). As it opens, a video store employee named Sidney Chabert discovers the body of 35-year-old Glorette Picard in a shopping cart in an alley behind a taquería. Since high school, Sidney has been “sprung” on Glorette (“Serious love,” one character explains, “like a disease”), a woman of such exceptional beauty that it has brought her nothing but misery.
When Glorette was 17, an older musician got her pregnant and then took off. Glorette “got on the rock” and has been turning tricks in exchange for crack and cash ever since, raising her son Victor on ramen noodles and orange juice. Sidney doesn’t call the cops. He muses about what the police would say: “Well, hell, someone killed a crack addict. Top priority. What did they used to call it? No Human Involved.”
No Human Involved, or NHI, a cruel police acronym, seems to set a challenge for Straight. She delves deep into a world filled with prostitutes, drug dealers and murderers, along with the do-right strivers they are related to, and reveals their inner lives with such depth and feeling that it is impossible to dismiss their humanity.
As Glorette’s body lies on the couch in the home of her father’s best friend, the narrative flows fluidly around the mystery of her death, the story belonging to one character and then the next, alighting in third-person, first-person and even a series of disembodied voices who speak dialogue so evocative that the people and their relationships become clear without any anchoring description. The sheer number of people to whom Glorette somehow mattered conveys the impact of her loss.
There’s Victor, Glorette’s son who earned the third-best grades in his senior class despite moving every few months to keep ahead of his mother’s eviction notices. And Marie-Claire, whose daughter Fantine is a globe-trotting travel writer and who is left to prepare Glorette’s body for burial, thinking of the time Glorette “was a baby in the bathtub with Fantine. Two faces turned up from the soapsuds with matching white beards.” And we meet Marie-Claire’s daughter-in-law Clarette, working extra shifts at a youth correctional facility — that sometimes holds her relatives — to pay for piano lessons and a good education for her children.
The characters move through their days in a wash of memory and reflection. Details that are cryptic in the first iteration are revisited through different perspectives until they take on clarity and emotional weight. Straight’s characters speak in language so arresting and natural that Richard Price and Elmore Leonard need to make room for her in the dialogue writing hall of fame.
How can a novel that is essentially the story of a dead prostitute prove so uplifting? It must be some kind of black magic that only Susan Straight can work. “No. I am not this person. I am not these people,” Clarette protests when Marie-Claire asks her to help prepare Glorette’s body. “She your people,” Marie-Claire insists. And by the end of this gorgeous and heart-wrenching novel, this family will be your people, too.
Jenny Shank’s first novel The Ringer is a finalist for the High Plains Book Award.
Between Heaven and Here
Susan Straight
(McSweeney’s, $22)
By JENNY SHANK Special Contributor
Published: 20 September 2012 06:56 PM
Susan Straight is like that rare teacher who sees only the best in the worst-behaved kid in the class. Although Riverside, Calif., turns up in its share of places-to-avoid lists, Straight has built a loving literary monument to her hometown in a series of award-winning novels set in Rio Seco, her fictional stand-in for Riverside, and she writes about the least of its residents with uncommon soul and grace.
Between Heaven and Here continues the story of a Rio Seco family with roots in Louisiana Creole culture that Straight explored in A Million Nightingales (2006) and Take One Candle Light a Room (2010). As it opens, a video store employee named Sidney Chabert discovers the body of 35-year-old Glorette Picard in a shopping cart in an alley behind a taquería. Since high school, Sidney has been “sprung” on Glorette (“Serious love,” one character explains, “like a disease”), a woman of such exceptional beauty that it has brought her nothing but misery.
When Glorette was 17, an older musician got her pregnant and then took off. Glorette “got on the rock” and has been turning tricks in exchange for crack and cash ever since, raising her son Victor on ramen noodles and orange juice. Sidney doesn’t call the cops. He muses about what the police would say: “Well, hell, someone killed a crack addict. Top priority. What did they used to call it? No Human Involved.”
No Human Involved, or NHI, a cruel police acronym, seems to set a challenge for Straight. She delves deep into a world filled with prostitutes, drug dealers and murderers, along with the do-right strivers they are related to, and reveals their inner lives with such depth and feeling that it is impossible to dismiss their humanity.
As Glorette’s body lies on the couch in the home of her father’s best friend, the narrative flows fluidly around the mystery of her death, the story belonging to one character and then the next, alighting in third-person, first-person and even a series of disembodied voices who speak dialogue so evocative that the people and their relationships become clear without any anchoring description. The sheer number of people to whom Glorette somehow mattered conveys the impact of her loss.
There’s Victor, Glorette’s son who earned the third-best grades in his senior class despite moving every few months to keep ahead of his mother’s eviction notices. And Marie-Claire, whose daughter Fantine is a globe-trotting travel writer and who is left to prepare Glorette’s body for burial, thinking of the time Glorette “was a baby in the bathtub with Fantine. Two faces turned up from the soapsuds with matching white beards.” And we meet Marie-Claire’s daughter-in-law Clarette, working extra shifts at a youth correctional facility — that sometimes holds her relatives — to pay for piano lessons and a good education for her children.
The characters move through their days in a wash of memory and reflection. Details that are cryptic in the first iteration are revisited through different perspectives until they take on clarity and emotional weight. Straight’s characters speak in language so arresting and natural that Richard Price and Elmore Leonard need to make room for her in the dialogue writing hall of fame.
How can a novel that is essentially the story of a dead prostitute prove so uplifting? It must be some kind of black magic that only Susan Straight can work. “No. I am not this person. I am not these people,” Clarette protests when Marie-Claire asks her to help prepare Glorette’s body. “She your people,” Marie-Claire insists. And by the end of this gorgeous and heart-wrenching novel, this family will be your people, too.
Jenny Shank’s first novel The Ringer is a finalist for the High Plains Book Award.
October 10, 2012
Although I've been an admirer of Straight's fiction since Aquaboogie, I consider Between Heaven and Here to be her best. The beauty of her writing, the gripping story, the depth of her characters and her observations on human nature ... I couldn't put it down. Once again, she took me inside the hearts and lives of people I see on the streets, but this time I finished the book feeling as though they were neighbors and friends. I'm reminded of Faulkner, in his most accessible work.
December 17, 2012
The author has created a story that seems real and got my attention with the vibrant and fascinating interplay between characters. I was left feeling that I had first hand knowledge of the events and lives of the characters.
I don't typically read this genre, but I'm glad I read this book.
I don't typically read this genre, but I'm glad I read this book.
August 13, 2018
I love Susan Straight. She is California born and raised, literary, a creative writing professor at UC Riverside and she straddles cultures. Her novels deal with the ethnic mix of her particular home turf in Riverside. She writes about families, mothers, kids and how they protect each other in the dangerous racial climate of 21st century America. She is a master novelist and I cannot imagine why she has not won a Pulitzer or National Book Award.
I had read seven of her eight novels. Back at the end of 2010, I binge-read four of them in a row and came away feeling I had been to a sort of literary religious revival. Those four were Blacker Than A Thousand Midnights, The Gettin Place, A Million Nightingales, and Take One Candle Light A Room.
In 2012 she published Between Heaven and Here. I bought it right away but ended up hoarding it until I was pretty sure another book was on the horizon. I found an interview from 2016 where she said she was finishing a novel so I took the plunge. I made Between Heaven and Here the July selection for my 2018 Read 12 Books From My TBR Lists project.
This short, rich, searing novel takes place in time between A Million Nightingales and Take One Candle Light A Room. The three books form a trilogy. Glorette, the most beautiful yet most damaged daughter of the extended family who people the three novels, has been found dead in a shopping cart. It is August, the ground is too hard and dry for digging a grave. If the police are brought in her memory will be made ugly and her son Victor will be too traumatized, not to mention probably becoming Social Services bait.
So the body is brought to the family compound in the orange groves. Victor is found and brought to his grandparents. Glorette's uncle Enrique goes in search of the killer. Out come the pickaxes, the shovels and the soaking hose to soften the ground. A grave is prepared.
Perhaps because the two earlier novels softened the hard dry hearts of her readers, we who think we have read it all, the succinct power of these 234 pages is all the stronger. When a troubled member of a large family dies, there are many viewpoints on the tragedy, varied reactions and anxieties. One whom the family has failed to protect has gone down. In flashes of incident, in memories, in the poetry of emotion, Glorette's short life is drawn for us.
I love Susan Straight even more now and if that new novel doesn't come soon, I may just have to go back and read the first eight books again.
February 1, 2013
Amazing breadth and depth for such a slim volume.
Between Heaven and Here appeared at my door courtesy of my McSweeney's book club subscription, so I did not realize that it was the third book in a series. I did a quick internet search and found out that the main events here take place in between the other two books. I didn't feel like I missed much by not reading the others first, but I'm a completist, so I'm going back to catch those soon!
A real community is quite complex. Susan Straight really builds a complex web of family and community in these connected stories.
I did have a few difficulties keeping such a large collection of characters straight. I should have sketched out a relationship diagram, but was too lazy. The complexities of the book simply mean that there is more to discover if you take another pass through. There is quite enough to warrant a return visit to our friends in Rio Seco.
Between Heaven and Here appeared at my door courtesy of my McSweeney's book club subscription, so I did not realize that it was the third book in a series. I did a quick internet search and found out that the main events here take place in between the other two books. I didn't feel like I missed much by not reading the others first, but I'm a completist, so I'm going back to catch those soon!
A real community is quite complex. Susan Straight really builds a complex web of family and community in these connected stories.
I did have a few difficulties keeping such a large collection of characters straight. I should have sketched out a relationship diagram, but was too lazy. The complexities of the book simply mean that there is more to discover if you take another pass through. There is quite enough to warrant a return visit to our friends in Rio Seco.
December 12, 2012
I loved this book so much....I find Susan Straight's Rio Seco trilogy one of the best portraits of contemporary America out there. I liked it so much I made this one of my top 5 fiction of the year for The Daily Beast:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles...
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles...
April 20, 2014
Beautifully written as usual but I got a little confused with the format on who was related to who at times. One big error I saw was this on page 214...."The Navigator bumping old-school House of Pain--'Insane in the membrane, insane in the brain'--and the moon hanging low like a damn Mento. Ugggg! That's old school Cypress Hill, not House of Pain.
March 11, 2014
A crack whore is dead in a shopping cart in a small SoCal town. Instead of letting the cops handle it--they wouldn't care--the people from her community, a street of houses, take her to her family who decide to faker the circumstances of her death so her teenage son won't grieve harder. He is the hope of the whole community, a very smart black boy who is on his way to a great university and middle class prospects. His family are transplants from Louisiana, blacks who moved West during the Great Migration because their boss was raping the women. They're French Creole and very insular. Everybody is related.
The title comes from the epigraph, which is a quote by Bubbles, a character from The Wire. Like that show, this is a portrait of poverty. Of proud working class folk. I was surprised to learn Straight is white, as she writes about the black experience so well. (She married and and has kids by a black man.) The third book in a trilogy. I didn't know it was, so that might explain the level of detail and jumping in at the book's start. The structure is going back and forth in time as characters remember things. But really the book takes place in a few days, from the discovery of the body to what the characters decide to do about their dead and shamed relative. It's not a murder mystery--the killer is revealed quickly--but more like an urban Rashomon, with portraits of many people in the community. It reminded me of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, but it's better, because it's not melodramatic; it's more honest; this is urban realism. If you have a Wire jonesing, pick up this book.
The title comes from the epigraph, which is a quote by Bubbles, a character from The Wire. Like that show, this is a portrait of poverty. Of proud working class folk. I was surprised to learn Straight is white, as she writes about the black experience so well. (She married and and has kids by a black man.) The third book in a trilogy. I didn't know it was, so that might explain the level of detail and jumping in at the book's start. The structure is going back and forth in time as characters remember things. But really the book takes place in a few days, from the discovery of the body to what the characters decide to do about their dead and shamed relative. It's not a murder mystery--the killer is revealed quickly--but more like an urban Rashomon, with portraits of many people in the community. It reminded me of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, but it's better, because it's not melodramatic; it's more honest; this is urban realism. If you have a Wire jonesing, pick up this book.
October 29, 2017
I recently started working in Riverside and so after discovering that Susan Straight's "Rio Seco" is based on Riverside I had to read her work. I now have more questions that answers about why Riverside is the way it is. Currently: why so much meth and homelessness? how did that happen? what do to about the addiction problems? But also: it's beautiful here. There are huge old trees, citrus groves, beautiful old buildings, wide streets, orange hills and mountains right in the middle of town. I suppose my questions could be about many many American communities. I hope to find a few good non fiction histories on the Inland Empire and (due to the nature of my work) will be reading much more about addiction. But Straight's fiction will continue to be a good companion as I work to understand my new living and working communities.
January 21, 2013
i really wanted to like this book.
i bought it after attending a book talk with the author. she made riverside, california sounds like a fascinating place.
the story's core is interesting.
but, the author is so scattered. she jumps from character to character and 50 years in the past or the future in a single chapter.
i even skipped a chapter in the middle that was completely nonsensical.
the book started off strongly. there are parts that are heartbreaking and haunting, charming, funny, and very real.
but she got off track. the narrative is not easy to follow. sometimes i didnt even know who was speaking!
it was very difficult to keep track of who was who and what the relation was.
halfway through i lost interest and was just racing to finish.
i bought it after attending a book talk with the author. she made riverside, california sounds like a fascinating place.
the story's core is interesting.
but, the author is so scattered. she jumps from character to character and 50 years in the past or the future in a single chapter.
i even skipped a chapter in the middle that was completely nonsensical.
the book started off strongly. there are parts that are heartbreaking and haunting, charming, funny, and very real.
but she got off track. the narrative is not easy to follow. sometimes i didnt even know who was speaking!
it was very difficult to keep track of who was who and what the relation was.
halfway through i lost interest and was just racing to finish.
July 23, 2014
I'm a huge Susan Straight fan and have read every book she's written. ( I think.) This book is definitely an accumulation of all her talents as a writer. Her mastery of dialogue left me awestruck. Told from multiple points of view, BH&H is a story about community, family and the ties that bind us to one another. But it's also about so much more. Drugs, sex, class and race. It's all in here. My new favorite.
October 12, 2013
I got a little frustrated with the first part of the book because it just seemed to keep covering old ground and not add anything new. Eventually, though, I got into it and enjoyed it the way I do all of Susan Straight's books. Her characters are so engaging--I feel like I know them--she is incredibly good at making me feel as if I am a part of the story.
May 1, 2016
A quick read with good snippets of many characters lives. While you don't see resolution for each of them, you can get a great sense for how the community is like. I specially like the contrast and similarities of all the mothers portrayed.
December 31, 2012
Beautiful.
July 24, 2019
It was just ok.
April 12, 2015
Interconnected stories about a Creole family living in Riverside, California. Glorette is the center, each story spoking off her troubled life and violent death. The stories take us to a levee in Louisiana where 100 people are stranded after a deadly flood in 1926, to a juvenile correctional facility in Chino, to Riverside's strip malls and highway overpasses and an improvised parking lot around a community college.
After a bit of a slow start, I came to love this family. I want to read more of their stories, or watch them play out in many seasons of an HBO/Showtime series. They're proud and edgy and clannish and simmering with resentments, disappointments, secrets. Beautiful writing, especially dialogue/voice. It's gritty like The Wire, with flashbacks like in a Toni Morrison novel, and the deep compassion of Let the Great World Spin.
After a bit of a slow start, I came to love this family. I want to read more of their stories, or watch them play out in many seasons of an HBO/Showtime series. They're proud and edgy and clannish and simmering with resentments, disappointments, secrets. Beautiful writing, especially dialogue/voice. It's gritty like The Wire, with flashbacks like in a Toni Morrison novel, and the deep compassion of Let the Great World Spin.
April 12, 2013
A beautiful woman grows up poor, betrayed by the men who want to own her beauty for a time. She gets pregnant as a teenager, has a son, does her best to raise him, but dies when he is still a teen. Murder or overdose, some people around her lie while others seek to uncover the truth.
People holding on to the edge still have much to lose.
This story was too dark for me, and skipped back and forth a little too much.
People holding on to the edge still have much to lose.
This story was too dark for me, and skipped back and forth a little too much.
September 16, 2013
Susan Straight was my creative writing teacher as an English major undergrad at University of California--Riverside so I am a bit biased towards her craft. Between Heaven and Here is a wonderful little story that finalizes a wonderful trilogy. There is a bit of bouncing around with the characters but it doesn't take away from the thoughtful yet tragic tale that needs to be told. Well done Susan!
July 27, 2016
While I had some trouble following the book in the beginning, it really turned around for me by the end.
What I thought would be a sort of "whodunit" around the death of Glorette, became a story about everything that went on around her son, Victor. It was hard not to want the best for him, and I think that's a sign of excellent writing. It was interesting to hear the different voices, telling their story and how it related. Another McSweeny's winner!
What I thought would be a sort of "whodunit" around the death of Glorette, became a story about everything that went on around her son, Victor. It was hard not to want the best for him, and I think that's a sign of excellent writing. It was interesting to hear the different voices, telling their story and how it related. Another McSweeny's winner!
January 12, 2015
I had the great pleasure of hearing Straight read part of this novel last month at Antioch University in Los Angeles - and I have to admit it took me a little while to settle into this book without her peaceful voice lulling me into it. This is a beautifully written, tragic, deeply complex story about humanity and life. I found it lovely and heartbreaking and I missed her lyrical voice - and several of the characters - when it was all over.
October 14, 2012
Well written, urgent, and compelling. She does a dope job of layering the thoughts and realities of the characters in a single moment. Real talk though, some of the urban dialect and cultural references (a few of which are incorrect) seemed really forced, which pulled me out of the text and made me more skeptical than I wish I would have been.
February 18, 2013
Beautiful writing.
Frustrating to try to keep track of all the characters.
Powerful moments.
Very depressing subject matter.
Focuses on how the past can seep up into the present.
Fortunately, by the end there's hope. And I understand Susan Straight will now be writing about this hopeful character in her next book. That's one I will read.
Frustrating to try to keep track of all the characters.
Powerful moments.
Very depressing subject matter.
Focuses on how the past can seep up into the present.
Fortunately, by the end there's hope. And I understand Susan Straight will now be writing about this hopeful character in her next book. That's one I will read.
December 26, 2012
Interrelated stories about a crack-addicted streetwalker in Riverside County, and the histories of her family. It was very well-written and beautifully evoked the world of the characters. My only complaint is that the dialect was so hard to understand, and the chapters revolving around individuals so hard to follow that I feel like I missed a lot of what the book had to offer.
March 19, 2013
Wish I had known this was third in a series . .would have started with the first one . . reading this, I felt kind of lost as I wasn't sure what was going on until I was about done with the book. Kind of hard for me . .however it was a trip to Creole country in Louisiana . . nice for historical/cultural value ..
February 28, 2013
I love this book & will read it again & again! The story is sad and yet compelling. You feel the characters, their environment & want to be there. Not that their life is wonderful & happy, but the people are so rich & deep that they make you want to sit down & BE with them. Will have to read Susan Straight's other novels.
May 31, 2013
Between the way the author plays with chronology and the way she's able to change her voice as the perspective changes from chapter to chapter, this was simply a beautiful read (if quietly heartbreaking). I only learned when I was some way in that this is the third book in a trilogy, so I'm hunting the first two down as soon as I can.
December 26, 2014
This is a beautiful book about ugly life. Ugly poverty, ugly drugs, ugly society. . . but a family that finds beauty in each other, in the cards they're dealt, in the no-holds-barred protection of the family unit. Susan Straight's powers of description, of creating place, are amazing, and the prose is often poetic. A wonderful read about hard existence.
September 9, 2012
I received this as a goodreads giveaway. It is a story about a girl that was just so beautiful and how everyone's life intermingles with each other in one form or another. It was a very descriptive book, I could feel the heat of the day seemingly to come right off the pages.
January 28, 2013
A beautifully written book doesn't necessarily indicate a good story. While I enjoyed her narrative, in the end it was more of a "month in the life of...". While I don't regret spending the time to read it, it wouldn't be a book I jump to recommend to others.
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