Starred review from May 30, 1994
Straight's first novel, I Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots , was roundly praised for the extraordinary poetry the author brought to the portrait of Marietta Cook, a proud black woman making her own way in rural South Carolina. Straight's new book picks up where Sorrow's Kitchen left off--in Rio Seco, a poor, hard-bitten suburb in East L.A. to which Marietta moved to be near her grown twin sons, both of whom play professional football. Marietta and her male friend, Roscoe, a poetically minded gardener, are part of an intensely realized, racially mixed American community in which the struggles of one young couple, Darnell and Brenda Tucker, figure most prominently. Darnell, but 20 years old, has a love of fires--he works part-time fighting the drought-induced conflagrations that race across the parched hillsides outside of L.A. He and Brenda are new parents of baby Charolette. Their attempt to carve a safe life amidst drive-by shootings, acquaintances ``slinging cain'' and constant harassment by the police is harrowing enough, but what emerges as the biggest obstacle to their self-determination is the silence of the fathers--not only Darnell's and Brenda's, but also the estimable Roscoe himself, whose son Louis, a former high school basketball standout, has run into problems with the law and, like the other ``children,'' finds no understanding from the man who raised him. In Straight's hands, this rough, dark, world pulses into life; her eye for the telling gesture, the apt figure, is so spectacularly keen that even a slight loss of narrative momentum at the book's midway point cannot be begrudged. Images of drought and wildfire wend through this novel like a musical theme, haunting the reader with both the threat and the promise of renewal. Major ad/promo; author tour.
February 1, 1994
Straight follows up her acclaimed I Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots ( LJ 4/15/92) with the story of Darnell Tucker, a serious young black man intent on avoiding a life of crime.
Starred review from June 1, 1994
Straight's splendid first novel, "I Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots", portrayed a strong and courageous black woman coming of age during the 1950s. In her second book, Straight moves into the present and tells the story of a strong and courageous young black man. Once again, she charts the currents of fear, love, and determination that shape a life lived in the face of great adversity. Darnell, called Nature Boy by his baffled city friends, is a firefighter, trained to battle the great wildfires that ravage California's kindling-dry hill country. But he's only a seasonal firefighter, and when his girlfriend Brenda gets pregnant, he knows he has to secure steady work to help support her and their child. The quest for a decent job, however, is damn near quixotic. A gig as a parking lot security guard ends in violence, and an interlude running drugs snaps Darnell out of his deep depression: You have got to stay alive and out of jail to support a family. Ultimately, Darnell realizes that he has to be as skillful and decisive in all aspects of life as he is when he battles forest fires. Straight has a great ear for the music of conversation, and her prose is potent, dignified, and lyrical, elevating the challenges of existence to a level of universal significance. And she writes under the banner of hope. ((Reviewed June 1994))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1994, American Library Association.)
May 1, 1995
A young man in East L.A. tries to carve out a place for his family and find a sense of self in this novel by the author of I Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots.