By Janet Kinosian
FROM: L.A. Times

Certain books give off the sense that you won’t want them to end, so splendid the writing, so lyrical the stories. Such is the case with Southern California novelist Susan Straight’s new memoir, “In the Country of Women.”

In the book, Straight tells the story of her Inland Empire hometown and its heat-laden terrain, masterfully blended with the stories of a profusion of ancestors, often women — tough, trauma-burdened women — who (somehow) make their way across the country, always headed west, from Mississippi, Oklahoma, Texas, the Colorado Rockies, even the Swiss Alps, to Riverside, Calif., the town where she was born and still lives today.

Writing a love letter to her three grown daughters, Straight tells stories of her own childhood with her siblings and frugal, Dodger-loving, Swiss immigrant mother and weaves them together with tales of her ex-husband Dwayne Sims’ more populous and effusive African American family. She also alternates chapters with the disquieting tales of those California Dreamin’ women (and men) who “crossed thousands of miles of hardship,” so that they could meet up at a local Riverside park near a tree that she still passes by daily on her way to work.

Her vibrant pages are filled with people of churned-together blood culled from scattered immigrants and native peoples, indomitable women and their babies. Yet they never succumb. “The women who came before you, my daughters, were legends,” she writes. “Their flights lasted decades,” and the intimate detailed stories she relates show how “each trekked thousands of miles and countless rivers,” just like the ancestors of millions of Americans, fleeing violence, starvation and economic death. Read Rest of Review Here