This novel by Susan Straight offers insights into the Californian communities that live mostly in the shadows, at least from the point of view of the Anglo world. These are not immigrants in the common usage of the term, but people whose roots to the state date back in some cases hundreds of years. And yet they are still treated as aliens, outsiders, and dangerous. The book appears to have been fused together from several stories, and the welding joints are not smooth. Straight also has an annoying habit of spewing perfectly quotidian details, firehose style, as if they were pearls of wisdom. In a few moving passages the characters transcend archetype, but much of the novel fails to launch.
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