I could not continue past the first chapter of this book, it was horrendous. Especially coming from a white author, I'm shocked this was greenlighted. The sexual assault was also unnecessary.

Those who have lived in southern California will recognize how much the weather can affect the lives and interactions of any given group of peoples. MECCA reads like a melting pot, a collection of people who live, work and survive in this unique landscape and how their lives interact in small ways to have a huge impact on readers. There are so many "hot" buttons throughout this book that readers should be prepared to have their emotions pushed and pulled.

In this novel, the reader meets a variety of individuals who live in Southern California. Some are recent immigrants from Mexico and other countries in Central or South America. Some are families with Latino backgrounds who have been in the area longer than the English pioneers who came to settle the land. Some are police, some are criminals. Some live in poverty, some are rich through work or luck.

The individual stories wrap around and the reader may become confused where the book is going. Yet as it progresses, the stories often merge and events that happened twenty years ago play out in the present. Other stories are just beginning and no one knows if they will have connections to the other ones.

Susan Straight is a native California from the area she writes about. Her work has gained awards with past works being named an NPR Book Of The Year and a National Book Award finalist. I listened to this book with its multiple narrators. Each did a good job although I think an added layer of richness would have applied if those presenting the story of recent immigrants had that accent. Readers will learn about the land and its people, often in ways never considered. This book is recommended for literary fiction readers.

Mecca by Susan Straight is a challenging and emotionally charged novel that is a perfect fit for readers who appreciate complex, character-driven stories that explore the intricate relationships between identity, family, place, and history, particularly those with a strong connection to California and its rich cultural heritage.

Mecca was not what I was expecting. This was an interesting journey of several diffferent persepctives and how their lives came to overlap. Mecca provided context into indigenous, and Black experiences in the US south, with flawed but human characters, and real life situations that left the characters relying on one another's discretion and support.

3.5 stars. Thank you to Net Galley and Farrar, Straus & Giroux for the ARC in exchange for my honest review. I enjoyed that this story took place in Southern California, Inland Empire and discusses history, family, and race/discrimination of people/families who have called the area home longer than most. We first meet Johnny Frias who is a California native and roots going way back through Indigenous people and Mexican settlers. He is a highway patrol offer by day and encounters racism on a daily basis on he road and in the office. On a day off, behind his family's house, he kills a man in defense of a woman who looks like she's being attacked and assaulted. The woman runs away but he sees that she's missing part of a finger. She disappears and he's left to clean up the scene. This leads to a cast of various characters of various backgrounds, all the many different types of people with many different reasons why they ended up in this area. The characters are related to one another in various ways and there's a bit of suspense as to how it all fits together. The story was fine but I really enjoyed the references to local areas.

I loved the descriptions that took place on the family ranches, the fires, the family discussions, the grief and Grief, and the gritty realism of the novel. A lot was being pushed in a short amount of space. I think as far as the writing, characterization, and important themes go this is a 5-star novel, but it jumped around a lot, covered characters who were minor in the scheme of things, and the main plotline was lost along the way. Interesting as a deep dive into life in the parts of Southern California that are far to the southeast of Los Angeles, the places we drive through on the way to desert resorts. The narrative just wasn't engaging enough. The book drops in and out of the lives of individuals who are loosely connected by history or family, but never staying long enough to fully satisfy.

I would like to thank Netgalley and Farrar, Straus, and Giroux for this ARC.

I have to admit, I was a little behind on the Susan Straight train. But I get it now. This is a beast of a novel, and I enjoyed every page of it. Thanks to the publisher for the e-galley.

Thank you Picador and Net Galley for providing me with an advanced readers copy of this magnificent novel which was recently released in paperback. Although I was late to the party despite the stunning reviews, I have shared this book with two book clubs whose reactions were as rhapsodic as my own.

Susan Straight has been dubbed the “bard of Southern California literature” and she shows her mettle in this story of multiethnic California. Straight opens with Southern California clichés as the reader rides along with California Highway Patrolman Johnny Frias as he wends his way through freeway traffic and fights brush fires ignited by sparks thrown from dilapidated vehicles. Straight then pushes back to the Inland Empire and the Coachella Valley, following various intertwined characters whose ancestors arrived in the 18th century with Spanish conquistadores, or whose grandmother arrived as a slave with 19th century Mormons, or who arrived in the 21st century with coyotes across the Mexican border. Straight’s characters form the backbones of agriculture, healthcare, and hospitality industries, with nurses and butchers and other essential workers contracting COVID during the early phase of the virus while their children, who could not attend school, were shuffled among friends and relatives.

Straight shows compassion for each of her characters, each of whom are victims of racism (Frias, for example, is told by a driver that he had pulled over for speeding, “Maybe I need to see your ID, make sure you’re not a bad hombre yourself”), and many of whom are victims of poverty. Although each of Straight’s characters are thought-provoking, whether illegal immigrants fleeing from ICE or the manager of a Conroy’s whose husband leaves her to pursue a career as a martial artist, the tour de force of the novel is the tale of Tenerife Johnson, a 16 year old basketball player who is on life support after being shot in a fast food line by a cop who claims that he “was reaching for a weapon.” It is his grieving mother Merry, a nurse who “dresses like Beyoncé” when she is not working, who laments how the press covering the tragedy were disappointed that Tenerife was not a gang member born to a 14 year old but, rather, the over-achieving child of educated parents who were married when he was conceived.

Susan Straight’s writing paints a vivid image of what the characters in this novel had to endure. Growing up as a Caucasian American woman in Southern California during the 60’s and 70’s, it was easy for me to visualize to people and locations included in the story. The discrimination of how the Hispanic and Indigenous communities were treated was horrific. Unfortunately, it stills is going on. The story allows the reader to take a deep look into their struggles. I enjoyed the story. I only wish it had a better ending. I felt the story just stopped and left me with loose ends.

Thank you #NetGalley, #FarrahStraussndGiroux, #SusanStraight and #Mecca:ANovel for the book for my honest review.

Thank you, NetGalley, for this book.

Sigh. Another white woman writing about people of color. Just no. This trend has got to stop. Let Black and Latinx people speak for themselves. Why do these books keep getting published? This book wasn’t even very good. So disjointed and threads all over the place. Some come together, but some don’t at all. The writing was good, but the plot was such a mess.

From Goodreads: 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.

Sure, this is what the book is about, but it just never comes together. You never spend enough time with one character to ever care about any of them. I went ahead and finished so I could write an honest review, but really, this book was just a waste of my time.

I was given a NetGalley widget for this one a year ago and I just got around to reading it and dangit it was so good. I am so thankful for the opportunity to have consumed this wildly relevant fictional tale, which felt not at all fictional, more like historical fiction, due to the times. The cover initially was what drew me in, but I'm so thankful to have stuck with it because the outcome was magical.

This entire book is just trauma porn. The POVs are too many and disjointed. Nothing happens except the most horrible things possible for a cast of all BIPOC characters.

Susan Straight is a force to be reckoned with. I knew this after I finished reading I Been in Sorrow’s Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots after it came out in 1992, and after I sought out, bought, and read everything else she’d written that was available. When I discovered that her new novel, Mecca, was available on Net Galley, I leapt on it. My thanks go to Net Galley and to Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux for the review copy. This book is for sale now.

Mecca, an ironic title if ever there was one, is a story of race, class, and gender, and the way that they play into the “Justice” system in California. Add a generous seasoning of climate change and its horrific effects in dry, dry Southern California, and a fistful of opioid addiction, and you have a heady mix indeed. But these are all well worn ground at this point, and this book is exceptional, not because it examines complex current events, but because of Straight’s facility in building visceral characters we care about, and launching them into this maelstrom in a way that makes it impossible to forget.

We begin with Johnny Frias, an American citizen of Latino heritage. As a rookie and while off duty, he kills a man that is raping and about to murder a woman named Bunny. He panics and gets rid of the body without reporting what’s happened. Frias is on the highway patrol, and he takes all sorts of racist crap all day every day. But his family relies on him, and when push comes to shove, he loves his home and takes pride in keeping it safe.

Ximena works as a maid at a hotel for women that have had plastic surgery. One day she is cleaning a room and finds a baby! What to do? She can’t call the authorities; she’d be blamed, jailed, deported, or who knows what. She does the best thing she can think of, and of course, there’s blowback anyway.

And when a young Black man, a good student with loads of promise that has never been in any trouble at school, or with the law, is killed because the cops see his phone fall out of the car and decide it’s a gun…?
I find this story interesting from the beginning, but it really kicks into gear in a big way at roughly the forty percent mark. From that point forward, it owns me.

As should be evident from what I’ve said so far, this story is loaded with triggers. You know what you can read, and what you can’t. For those of us that can: Straight’s gift is in her ability to tell these stories naturally, and to develop these characters so completely that they almost feel like family. It is through caring about her characters that we are drawn into the events that take place around them, and the things that happen to them.

This is a complex novel with many moving parts and connections. I read part of this using the audio version, which I checked out from Seattle Bibliocommons. But whereas the narrators do a fine job, I find it easier to keep track of the characters and threads when I can see it in print. If you are someone that can’t understand a story well until you’ve heard it, go for the audio, or best of all, get both.

Highly recommended.

I enjoyed this one. It started off a bit slow for me, but once other characters started showing up…I was really able to get invested.

The story is well written and very thought provoking. We experience heartbreak and courage with the characters and their lives. This is not one that I’ll soon forget. I don’t really care for abrupt endings, but this one seems to work.

This book is a love story for southern California. I think if you are from Cali it will have particular appeal and draw you in early. And it also shines a light on the delicate climate conditions and the disasterous effects of the wildfires on the lives of farmers. For those of us not from there, it takes a while for the deeper stories to really kick in. There are several stories happening simultaneously all of them related to immigrants or second generation immigrants are those who are actually indigenous by perceived as immigrants. The book illustrates the treatment each of these people receives as maids, nurses and even highway patrol. It tells the very personal stories of crossing the border, or having a child shot by the police, of being a member of law enforcement while being a person of color. So many angles to this rich story.

Straight's novel covers a series of interacting stories that tie together a group of friends over the course of many years. Southern California is surely a character on its own in this book. The descriptions of the area and the way it interacts with nearly everything the characters do just wraps around you. The lyrical writing style really stands out in this novel as well. I waffled between a three and four on my rating. I loved the writing style, the characters, and the setting, as well as the tough concepts this book attacked. I did struggle a bit with keeping up with the various storylines and remembering the ways all the characters connected. The other part I struggled with was the lack of resolution to the storylines at the end. I am trying to grow more comfortable with open ending novels, but it is still something that leaves me a bit unsatisfied at this point. That is largely a personal short-coming/preference, however. Overall, would highly recommend and definitely worth the read.

Mecca is a city in Southern CA that is not part of the glamour we usually associate with the state. And the people in the story are not celebrities, but a people who are struggling and living every day lives. There is an undocumented woman who is trying to make a life but ends up having to run from ICE or be deported. There is a woman whose family has deep California roots, but with darker skin is often assumed to be Mexican and faces discrimination every day. There is a man who becomes a California Highway Patrol officer, but also faces discrimination on the force and by many around him. The stories are amazing and gritty. The characters face many challenges; immigration raids, raging wildfires, and trying to make a better life. Family is important, and so are friends. This is not an easy read, but worth reading. #mecca #susanstraight #netgalley #bookstagram #booklover #bookrecommendations #bookreview #lovetoread #booksbooksbooks #takeapagefrommybook #readersofinstagram #addtoyourtbr #bookloversofinstagram #nytimesbookreview

Very interesting story that dances around the discrimination of Spanish speaking people living and working in the state of California.. It's a survival tale of a family who protect and stand-up for each other. Racial discrimination is not limited to people of African descent as we see in this family's story.

I found myself pulled into this story very quickly, but thrown off by the multiple stories going on at one time. It took too long to see how everything connected and honestly, I would have appreciated this one being longer to really build out each 'world'. However, this one definitely has some serious merit otherwise as it kept me on my toes. I'll read this one again in the future.