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lizawall's review against another edition
I read this because my friend edited it. I am proud of her!
natesea's review against another edition
4.0
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.
jennyshank's review against another edition
5.0
http://www.dallasnews.com/entertainment/books/20120920-between-heaven-and-here-by-susan-straight-is-an-uplifting-gorgeous-novel.ece
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.
mariek212's review against another edition
3.0
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!
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