This was a fantastic read from an author I had not previously read. I have already begun another of her books. She’s that good.

This is a story of interactions between people in Southern California. These people are US residents, but by appearance and names, are frequently accused of being immigrants. These people are varied, colorful, and very interesting. It is a social history that helped me understand lives that are quite different from mine own. This is why I read.

This book was provided to me by NetGalley in return for an honest review.

I was immediately taken in by this book - in part because I am familiar with the area in which the story takes place and in part because the characters are well developed and very interesting. The author does a magnificent job of illustrating the difficulties Hispanics and Native Americans face regularly. Being treated poorly by employers, sales persons and police. The author also illustrates how illegal aliens function. It’s a very interesting, thought-provoking book.

** spoiler alert ** An interesting read. I did not know much about the people of California. This book gave a good look at what it is like to be both an American citizen and an illegal with brown skin in that state.
The intertwined stories of the characters were well-done. At the same time, I found every story to be a tragedy and each character to have a sad life.
My only complaint was with the ending. I went back and read a bit of the end to see if I missed something. I felt the book had no closure.

A book encompassing racism, the role of police in local communities and the struggle BIPOC Americans face in their daily lives as American citizens. Well written. Disturbing.

I just couldn't get into this book. Maybe it wasn't the right time for me to read it. I think it has potential. Therefore, I can only give it a moderate review. Thank you for letting me have the opportunity to look at it.

Susan Straight offers powerful, and quite painful vignettes of the lives of outsiders looking in to the lives of the other "better" half. The story is replete with rich descriptions of life in Southern California that ring true to any native. And while the title Mecca might suggest a place you with to visit, that is only true inn these stories if you are part of the privileged class.

Forewarning: there is not resolution or end. It just stops. But it was a great multiple POV story with a lot of heart.

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

Mecca is a novel that will stay with me for quite some time. Not only is the writing beautiful, but I got attached to the characters. Thank to the author, publisher and NetGalley

This was a stunning book, but - like Honoree Jeffries' The Love Songs of W. E. B. DuBois and Anthony Doerr's Cloud Cuckoo Land - it's one that demands a physical copy to be read and absorbed as intended. I struggled reading this on my Kindle; the book jumps characters, stories, and years (like Sequoia Nagamatsu's How High We Go In The Dark, it's almost more a collection of linked short stories than a traditional novel), but all these threads are elegantly and powerfully woven together, and I know I would have benefitted from being able to flip back more easily. I wanted it to be easier to answer questions like "I know I've heard this name before, what was she doing last we saw her?" and "We've heard a description of a man who sounds like he might be this character we're just now bringing into focus - is that right?" It's by no means a bad thing when I have to work to understand a book - especially, in cases like these, where I'm getting such a vivid, raw glimpse into a world that's far outside my own lived experience - but in my own experience, an ebook isn't the right conduit, and it inhibited what I know I'll get out of this book when I read a physical copy.

Thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

5/5 Stars

Susan Straight creates a stunning backdrop of modern day Southern California in her novel Mecca. Following the interwoven stories of a collected group of “family members” who have known each other in most cases since birth, Mecca is searing look into racism, the role of police in local communities and the struggle BIPOC Americans face in their daily lives as American citizens.

You won’t find a romanticized version of California in this novel. Straight tackles the lives and hardships of each of her main characters with a sense of realness and tragedy that isn’t for the faint of heart. But those defined tragedies truly echo through the story, even as she brings to live Ice raids, police brutality and sexual assault.

I’m so glad I picked this book up on a whim - it stayed in my mind long after I had finished it and I will gladly recommend to all those that are interested. My only wish was that I had more at the end.

Thanks to Net Galley, Farrar, Stars and Giroux, and the author for the ARC in exchange for my honest review!

Knockout. A big, layered, vibrant saga of non-white lives in California, and their tangled, rooted histories, This novel bursts with energy and a protective humanity. The characters, and there are many, have rich mixed heritages which often lay them open to racism and abuse. They work demanding jobs. They have powerful attachments that often deliver pain. There is a life force to them, delivered by the bushel in this affecting novel.

This book had some great themes and ideas, but ultimately i had to dnf this about 30% of the way through because it just wasn’t clicking with me unfortunately. writing style wasn’t really for me and i found myself pretty bored

MECCA by Susan Straight, National Book Award finalist, is a complex work of historical fiction told from alternating viewpoints, almost like a set of interconnected short stories. Straight introduces a young cop, Johnny Frias, his friends, and their girlfriends in a novel which spans several decades. These are mainly working-class Californians – butcher, florist, maid – of Hispanic and Indigenous descent. And there is ample opportunity for Straight to highlight the prejudice they encounter: "People like him always said up and down. They came up from Mexico. I'm never going down there. For their parents it was, they came across from Ireland. England. Germany. On a boat." Frias deals with that prejudice at work and with misunderstanding from friends and family, especially after a police shooting of a young, unarmed teen. Sexual assault, an abandoned baby, undocumented workers, a long-ago murder, and the Covid pandemic are all woven into the well-written story. MECCA was named a Most Anticipated Book for March 2022 by the Los Angeles Times and USA Today; was an Amazon Best Book of March 2022, and received starred reviews from Kirkus and Publishers Weekly. The Economist sums it up, calling MECCA a "triumphant, polyphonic new novel [in which] the working people behind the glamour of the Golden State are revealed in all their multiplicity, with Ms. Straight's trademark tenderness and humour."

Thanks to Netgalley for an ARC of this book, in exchange for a fair and honest review.

This is group of interlocked stories, that really tie together to make a cohesive novel, focusing on interrelated characters. It focuses on the experience of people of color in California, and is fascinating. It doesn't matter if your families have been in California for generations, or if you're an undocumented immigrant - you're still treated with disrespect and insults - "go back to Mexico."

I have read some complaints about the book, because this is not the author's personal experience, but I don't agree. This is fiction, and numerous authors write fiction that is not autobiographical. After all, people swoon over historical romances, for instance, even though the authors of these books are not actually women involved in romances with 18th century dukes!

This book felt real, and I loved it. I couldn't stop reading, devoured it in a day. The characters rang true, and the setting was beautifully described. I could feel the overpowering heat and the oppressive fear of the fires. The addition of COVID also made this feel more realistic - it wasn't the overwhelming subject of the book, but the reality of COVID clearly influenced everyone's reality (as it did in real life!)

I will definitely be looking for more books by Susan Straight.

This was a very unique and relevant story.
It gave me slight RAZORBLADE TEARS vibes, but overall was a completely different type of book.

This story is set in CA and hops around from different Hispanic residents and displays a glimpse of their daily life. We see the struggles they face, the racial injustices they deal with and the overarching fear of being deported.
The stories were powerful and intriguing. I was excited to see how they all came together through the course fo the book as well.

The ending was frightening and ended on such a cliff hanger. As I was listening to it, it left me scratching my head a bit as I think there are several gaps we as the reader can fill in.
I think this is a powerful story and very educational to see the different perspectives. It really honed in on the overarching presence of hope no matter what your situation.

I will say I am very glad I listened to this book. There were so many foreign words I would not have know how to pronounce and the narrators did an amazing job. I actually tried to listen and read this book simultaneously, but found I enjoyed the audio more.

Susan Straight has a terrific, even passionate, sense of place. This book is especially for those who have lived and loved in southern California. The hot, dry Santa Ana winds are right in these pages. A CHP motorcyclist takes us out on the freeways as he catches speeders in the late night/early morning hours. A sprawling family living hidden in the canyons introduces us to the byways and mysteries there, and to the extreme fire danger that is so much a part of their lives.

As the opening pages acknowledge, sections of the book have appeared elsewhere, and the author artfully strings them together to provide a picture of people who live on the edge and are making it. Though outsiders do not understand, they know who they are and out of which stream of migrants they and their families came. Were their ancestors Native Americans? Early Spanish? Louisiana Blacks? No matter - they are Americans, and no ICE can tell them different.

As you can tell, I really enjoyed these stories, despite some difficulty. Many stories put together mean a large cast of people, and I couldn't always keep track of who was speaking and whether I had met them before. Nevertheless I can't wait to hear more about what happened to Manny.

This is a hard one to review because I felt like I should have liked it more than I did. The writing was good, the stories important but I found it hard to get through. I was initially pulled into the book about a California born Latino CHP and the racism he encounters. But then abruptly we were off on a new character and story and I wasn't sure if this was a book of short stories or a novel. Eventually all of the different stories and characters do link together but there was not enough of a thread throughout the book, so I kept feeling like I was starting over. There were definitely some engrossing and compelling scenes in the book where I'd be pulled in, but overall I found the book hard to pick back up when I put it down.

This is a good ole great American novel, and I'm so glad I read it! This is historical fiction of a people/place I have read little about and found to be utterly fascinating. I am curious to read some #ownvoices thoughts, but I found the writing beautiful and the story fascinating.

Don’t be misled by the title. This novel has nothing to do with the Middle East. We’re talking Mecca, California, a desert community justbnorth of the Salton Sea, a land of Joshua trees, scorpions and the Santa Ana winds. This is the land where Johnny Frias grew up. He’s been riding motorcycle for the California Highway Patrol about two decades now. When he was a rookie, he killed a man, in self-defence and to protect the young woman the man, jumped up on something, was raping and savagely assaulting. The girl, Bunny, scrambled up and took off in her car, leaving Johnny with no witness. Johnny knew what would happen if he reported it—with the deep-rooted racism in the department, it wouldn’t go well for him. So he covered it up. But all these years later, it still haunts him, and he’s still looking for Bunny.

That event is what ties together the disparate characters in the story, though they mostly don’t realize it. This is a cast of characters of a type I don’t remember seeing much in all my reading. They’re the “true” Californians, descendants of Indio and Mexican and black people who came into the country before it was a country, long before borders. But racism is endemic, casual and brutal and sometimes deadly, and these many-generation Americans are still forced to prove, over and over, that they’re entitled to be there, not illegal immigrants.

This is a character-driven, big-hearted book, sometimes heart-breaking, gripping in its intensity. Highly recommended.

I am sorry, I did not like the book. I stopped at 24%. Here are my thoughts about what I read. There seemed to be two story lines, both started abruptly. You read about a single man, and then a young woman. One is legal, one is illegal. Both seem to have absolutely nothing positive happen to them. Yes, life is hard, but there are good moments too. I couldn't warm to either character.