Highwire Moon by Susan Straight

An illegal alien inadvertently abandons her toddler daughter when she is deported. The daughter goes through the foster care system and ends up with her white trash father. After twelve years the mother and daughter try to find each other.

There is no break in the unending misery of the characters in this novel. The author doesn't believe in comic relief, obviously. Fiction does affect the mood of those who read it - I was depressed and in a funk while suffering through this novel.

The author knows her craft and does write well, but in my opinion the novel has several serious flaws.

• The constant melancholy tone and the incredible string of bad luck for the characters required me to force myself to finish the novel.


• Every major character has childhood trauma that they harp on constantly. This has become such a cliche in literary fiction. The character of the daughter, for instance, cannot have a single thought without relating it to the fact she was abandoned by her mother. This became excessively tiresome.


• The non-ending ending is a disaster. The author takes us to the brink of getting the mother and daughter back together, and then lacks the courage to go through with it. Instead she opts for a pseudo-sophisticated non-ending. Does this make sense? Tell a story, but stop just before the ending? A story without an ending is not a story.

Sorry if I am being harsh, but after suffering through the misery of this novel, I really have to speak my mind. Not a big surprise that this was a finalist for the National Book Award - the more of those novels I read the less is my opinion of that award.