A young Mexican mother struggles to reconnect with her child in America—a “heartrending, take-no-prisoners” novel and National Book Award finalist (Publishers Weekly).

As an undocumented migrant worker, Serafina has scratched together a life for herself and her three-year-old daughter, Elvia, in the unglamorous shadows of Hollywood—until the morning she is apprehended by immigration officials and deported, separated from her terrified daughter who is crouched under the dashboard of their car.

By the time Elvia is fifteen, she has survived numerous foster homes and a father ill-suited to raising a tough-talking, pregnant young woman. Fighting for herself and her unborn child, she decides to search for her long-lost mother. Meanwhile, Serafina is making her way back across the Mexican border to find her little girl after all these years.

Hailed by the New York Times Book Review as “an eye-opener of a novel, a road map to the real California,” Susan Straight “turns headlines into poetry.” As with all her work, Straight’s fourth novel presents a vital and unsparing vision of America.