ALPHABET SOUP 2020 CHALLENGE–AUTHOR EDITION, Letter “B”

Natalie Basizle’s Queen Sugar is my second choice for the Alphabet Soup Challenge for this year. It was chosen by my Page Turner’s Book Club for its February selection. Basizle wrote it in 2014, and it was the basis for an original, hit series on Oprah’s OWN Network. As critics remarked, the novel is “exquisitely written” and tells about the “joys and sorrows of family, love, endurance, and hard work.” Charley Bordelon, the owner of a sugar cane farm her father left her, certainly embodies the last two. With Micah, her eleven year old daughter, she leaves her home in LA and moves to southern Luisiana to farm the 800 acres she inherits.

My favorite part of reading the novel was appreciating the author’s ability to form and develop “complex characters” the reader was led to empathize with. It is, as it’s cover advertises, “heartbreaking,””page-turning,” and delivers the promised “hint of bayou magic.” Miss Honey, Charlie’s grandmother; Ralph Angel, her half brother; Violet, her sister; and Hollywood, a neighbor and Ralph Angel’s high school buddy round out the cast of characters. And, what reader could ever forget the wisdom and support of her partners, an elderly African American retired sugarcane farmer and an ornery white cane farmer who has lost his spread? More than once, they saved Charley from disaster and even from herself. The villain, a white man named Landry threatens Charley early on, “Cane farming is always going to be a white man’s business.” This challenge spurs Charley on to prove him and everyone else wrong.

Especially for a debut novel, this is a”darned good read”

 

 

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