Sacrament A novel

Straight's immersive latest (after Mecca) follows a group of nurses at the height of Covid-19 in August 2020. The nurses are not only isolated from their families--they live in a makeshift RV village near the hospital in San Bernardino, Calif.--but they cope with all the death they face in the ICU, where their patients are intubated, by not speaking about it. Among the nurses are Larette, who sings to her comatose patients and longs for her husband, Grief Embers, who works for Animal Control, and their son, Dante, who's about to enter high school. Larette's cousin, Cherrise, is one of her coworkers, and Cherrise is constantly worried about her 15-year-old daughter, Raquel, whom she sent to live on her aunt's date farm. Grief's best friend, Johnny Frias, the highway patrolman who featured in Mecca, has a crush on Cherrise, whose husband died eight years earlier in a car accident. Told in alternating points of view, the narrative captures the heroism and sacrifice of healthcare workers during the pandemic, and is shot through with rich depictions of Southern California's landscape, particularly as Raquel learns the ropes of growing dates. It's a vibrant drama. (Oct.)

A Covid-19 novel but also so much more. Opening during the spring of 2020, this book refracts the early days of the pandemic with the acuity of a laser, not unlike Straight's previous novel,Mecca (2022). But if this is the situation of the narrative, its story is the complexity of love and longing, the edgy insistence of the human heart. Straight begins by focusing on three Covid nurses--Cherrise, Larette, and Marisol--who for the safety of their families have been moved to a small trailer park erected near the hospital where they work in the ICU. "They say we're gonna get it under control. I'll be back to get you in August," Cherrise tells her 15-year-old daughter, Raquel, after leaving her with relatives. And yet, it is impossible to read this exchange without recalling the fear and trembling of that moment, in which time felt as if it had lost its shape. Straight makes this idea explicit by reintroducing Highway Patrol officer Johnny Frias, a major character inMecca, who comes to play a significant role in this new work after Raquel disappears. Don't be misled, though: This is no mere sequel, but what we might imagine as a parallel text, an adjacent set of stories taking place in a world where linearity, chronology, have become words from a different lexicon. This simultaneity makes the relationship between the novels nuanced and compelling, a broadening rather than a lengthening. It's an astonishing move, one that feels true both to the moment of the action and the moment in which we are reading, the aftermath of a crisis, or a series of crises, that has not fully gone away. Straight reminds us of where we have been and where we are going without once looking away. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.