Mecca

Title:

Mecca

Author:

Summary:

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.

Edition:

First edition.

Physical Description:

370 pages ; 22 cm

Subject Term:

Traffic police -- Fiction.

Mexican Americans -- Fiction.

Mexican American families -- Fiction.

Marginality, Social -- Fiction.

Geographic Term:

California, Southern -- Fiction.

Publisher:

Farrar, Straus and Giroux,

Publication Date:

2022

ISBN:

9780374604516

Publication Information:

New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022.

Call Number:

STRAIGHT

Holds: Copies:

Available:*

Item Barcode	Collection	Call Number	Status	Item Holds
33607003598920	Adult Fiction	STRAIGHT Susan	Searching... Unknown	Searching... Unavailable

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

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.

Author Notes

Novelist and short story writer Susan Straight graduated from Amherst College in 1984.

She teaches Creative Writing at the University of California in Riverside.

Aquaboogie, her first collection of short stories, won the Milkweed National Fiction Prize and was one of Publishers Weekly's best paperbacks (1990). I Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots was named one of 1992's best novels by both Publishers Weekly and USA Today. It was also a New York Times Notable Book.

(Bowker Author Biography)

Reviews (2)

Publisher's Weekly Review

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. (Mar.)

Library Journal Review

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.