Susan Straight - Take One Candle Light a Room

Tuesday, October 19th

5:30-7:30PM

Susan Straight discusses and signs her book Take One Candle Light a Room.  

If you are unable to attend,you must call the book shop to order signed books.  

For some, despite passage of time or change of location, the past is very much alive. Such is the case for Fantine, a travel writer living in L.A., worlds apart from Rio Seco, the community she grew up in only an hour east. Even while roaming the globe and with skin so light that she can pass for “Argentinean. Or Andalusian. Maybe a tanned Angeleno,” Fantine is, and will always be, African American. On the fifth anniversary of the death of Glorette, the past comes rushing back. In luscious prose, author Straight expertly captures the complexities of Fantine’s identity. Having broken with her family to live in the city, Fantine straddles two worlds; now a tourist in her family home, she dresses and speaks different than her peers. As hurricane Katrina brews in the Gulf, a family crisis sends Fantine back to Rio Seco and then on to Louisiana, where, in 1958, her and Glorette’s mothers fled to escape a serial rapist who felt entitled to black girls, and where, generations earlier, Moinette, an ancestor, lived as a slave, as depicted in A Million Nightingales (2006). --Ben Segedin