Shelf Awareness Book Talk: *Between Heaven and Here*, by Susan Straight

Between Heaven and Here
Susan Straight
McSweeney’s (September 2012), Hardcover (ISBN 1936365758 / 9781936365753)
Fiction, 208 pages

A version of this review was previously published in Shelf Awareness for Readers (September 25, 2012).

Opening lines (from the Advance Reader’s copy): “When Sidney came out of the taqueria and headed down the alley, he saw Glorette Picard on her knees, her back to a shopping cart parked near the fence, her face held up to the shadows made by two wild tobacco trees that grew along the chainlink. Sidney flattened himself against the wall, holding the bag of tacos like a school lunch, and waited for the sound of a man’s voice.”

Book description, from the publisher's website:

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.

Comments: Susan Straight has explored the fictional landscape of Rio Seco, California for over two decades, and while each of her novels can stand on its own, many of the same characters make recurring appearances. In Between Heaven and Here, she continues the stories of the Sarrat families from A Million Nightingales (2007) and Take One Candle Light a Room (2010), but reading the books in publication order isn’t strictly necessary, and the events in this third novel precede those in Take One Candle... by five years. This is a trilogy by virtue of people and place, rather than plot.

Tied together by blood, marriages, and the enclave they’d established across the canal from the city and named for their Louisiana hometown, the Antoines and Picards are both well-known and set apart in Rio Seco, and none more so than Glorette, the most beautiful of the Sarrat girls. Sadly, that beauty has never gotten her very much--a teenage son, a crack addiction, and on the eve of her thirty-fifth birthday, it may have gotten her murdered. This is a family matter, because will anyone else care about the death of streetwalker whose body was found in a shopping cart in a back alley?

Between Heaven and Here relates the days surrounding Glorette’s death, the search for her killer, and years of family history from multiple perspectives, including those of her father, her uncle and aunt, a nephew, a sister-in-law, and her son Victor. Straight knows her landscape well, and renders it vividly. She has created an affecting world in Rio Seco, and even as she brings this story to a close, one hopes that world has many more stories to tell.

Rating: 3.75/5