1,001 Novels: A Library of America
Queen Sugar (2014)
by Natalie Baszile
St. James Parish, Louisiana
Louisiana: 24/30
Cotton gets most of the press when you consider deep south agriculture, but sugar is part of the story as well. If you don't know the story of sugar and the role it played in advancing the slavery-industrial complex in the 18th and 19th century, you can't grasp the significance of a novel about a young African American woman who suprise-inherits a sugar plantation in Louisiana, but to be fair, neither does the protagonist- a native Californian who uproots her daughter in the aftermath of the untimely death of her husband and decides to make a go of it in the deep south.
Queen Sugar is pitched somewhere between "issue novel" and "chick lit" with elements that hint at something deeper with plot points that sound like they were written for television (Queen Sugar was adapted into a movie for Oprah's OWN network). Charley, the protagonist, is primarily concerned with survival and to a lesser degree with the issues faced by her own family, specifically those of Ralph, her ne'er-do-well younger brother, the product of a childhood fling between her father and a local, mentally unstable girl during high school. Ralph has led a life filled with issues- taken from his mother in Louisiana to live with Charley and their father in California, being returned to Louisiana for being to difficult, dropping out of college a couple semesters short of his college degree (in Civil Engineering?!?!), succumbing to drug addiction in Phoenix of all places, losing his wife to an overdose, abandoning her body and taking his son back to Louisiana. It wasn't hard to tell where Ralph was headed.
I enjoyed Queen Chapters for the portions that actually dealt with the process of farming sugar cane- after reading endless books about cotton farming, it was a welcome shift. I also thought the plot was more interesting than the book Baszile wrote, but I can see where she was aiming.
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