In the Country of Women

May 6, 2019
Novelist Straight (Between Heaven and Here) focuses on the lives of the women in her family in this moving memoir. The narrative is framed as a letter to Straight’s three daughters—Gaila, Delphine, and Rosette—whom Straight shares with her ex-husband Dwayne Sims, and honors the daughters’ rich ancestral past through stories of female relatives struggling to overcome violence, oppression, and hardship. Straight celebrates Jennie Stevenson, an aunt on the Sims side who, in the early 1900s, shot a man who cornered her, and Straight’s mother, a Swiss immigrant who left home after her stepmother tried to marry her off at 15 to a pig farmer. The author excels in chapters about raising her kids, and about finding her place in the Sims clan (Straight is white, Sims is African-American). She feels indebted to her mother-in-law, Alberta Sims, who showed her how to keep family and friends close (“she took my hand and led me to the kitchen.... Alberta cooked for the whole community”). In the touching final chapter, Straight reflects on the enduring power of memory: “All we women have to give you is memory.... What we felt we might keep to ourselves, unless someone wrote it down.” Straight passionately illuminates the hard journeys of women.

May 15, 2019
A moving family saga celebrates generations of bold, brave, and determined women. Award-winning novelist Straight (Between Heaven and Here, 2012, etc.) makes her nonfiction debut with an eloquent, absorbing memoir. Addressed to her three adult daughters, the narrative weaves together stories that transcend time, place, race, and ethnicity to vibrantly portray her children's rich ancestry. Straight is white: Her mother grew up in the Swiss Alps; her father, in Colorado. The couple settled in Riverside, California, a hardscrabble community of a wide variety of mixed ethnicities, all "dreamers of the golden dream." When she was 14, she met Dwayne Sims, an African American high school classmate; years later, they married and eventually settled near their families. Straight taught English to refugees and at a city college; Dwayne worked at a juvenile correctional facility. Frugality was a way of life. When her youngest daughter was asked how the family fared, she replied, "Wait--what's below humble?" They had been poor, Straight admits, finding furniture on the street and living without air conditioning in temperatures over 100 degrees, but "the safety and tether and history" of their families was ample compensation. "The women who came before you, my daughters, were legends," writes the author, and their journeys--from Africa, Europe, and across the American continent--entailed convoluted "maps and threads" that culminated in her own girls, "the apex of the dream." Her daughters inherited not only their ancestors' "defined cheekbones and dimples and high-set hips," but, more crucially, their beauty, intelligence, and defiant independence. Among those many women, Dwayne's mother, Alberta, shines: "bemused and regal and slightly mischievous," a warmhearted woman who unreservedly welcomed her white daughter-in-law. Listening to family stories and mining ancestry.com, Straight recounts the peril and hope, forced migration and fierce escapes, "thousands of miles of hardship," that women endured. "All of American history," she tells her daughters, "is in your bones." A radiant memoir imbued with palpable love.

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Starred review from June 1, 2019
Lifelong booklover Straight married her high-school sweetheart, basketball player Dwayne Sims, and they bestowed on their three daughters a global heritage?African American, Cherokee, Creek, English, Filipino, French, Haitian, Irish, Mexican, Samoan, and Swiss. In her first work of nonfiction, a captivating mixture of family history and memoir, much-honored novelist Straight tells the stories of powerful and courageous women in both her and Sims' bloodlines, determined survivors of complex traumas who crossed thousands of miles of hardship on quests for freedom from poverty, slavery, and violence. Readers meet Sims' great-great-grandmother, Fine, born and quickly orphaned in Tennessee soon after the Civil War, and Straight's mother, who escaped a grim, motherless childhood in the Swiss Alps. With stirring details and delving perceptions, Straight chronicles the repercussions, generation after generation, of enslavement, Jim Crow, and immigration as well as rape, murder, grueling work, and single motherhood while tracing the journeys of the women in her clan to Canada, Mississippi, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Arizona, and finally, gritty, multicultural Riverside, California, Straight's hometown. As Straight braids her three daughters into this deeply affecting saga, she maps her path to becoming a writer, encouraged by her mentor, James Baldwin, and profoundly inspired by her mother-in-law. Ultimately, this is a ravishing and revelatory celebration of womanhood, resilience, family, community, and America's defining diversity.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)