Harbinger of Books

Queen Sugar by Natalie Baszile is the story of Charley Bordelon a widow with a daughter at the start of her teenage years. Charley’s father has died of cancer and for some reason he has leveraged everything he has into buying an 800 acre sugar cane plantation in Louisiana. When her father passed Charley expected a normal inheritance not a plantation with conditions, but she is in need of a fresh start and  decides that if her father wanted her to take up farming she would leave California behind and see what happens. But farming is not easy and now Charley has to manage family issues with her half brother and her grandmother as well as getting a crash course into managing a sugar cane plantation.

This is an interesting story. I did enjoy reading about the complexity of the characters how guilt caused people to be overly sympathetic or how a person could be so down on himself that no matter how much they tried they continuously made a mess of every situation. The relationships between the characters felt authentic and it is very compelling. Even the descriptions of landscape was enticing I will admit I have no interest in how to grow sugar cane but by the end of the story I felt vested in the fields as well. I listened to this book on audio and I loved the narrator she had just the right pitch and speed bringing the story to life.

While I enjoyed a great deal of things about the story there are a few significant challenges. The first is the book moves so very slow and while there is a richness in the descriptions at times it bogged down to the point where I would literally listen to an hour and put it down for weeks. The second is there are some holes in the plot that I never quite gained any resolution for example why would a man leave Louisiana pour all of his money into a plantation then leave only that to his daughter with such significant stipulations, when he himself was not a farmer? To me it would have made more sense if the father had left it to both his children with all of those stipulation. The final issue was at the end there are some loose ends, I wanted to know if Miss Honey ever really apologized to Charley after she saw the choices Ralph Angel had made and what happened with her partners and the bit with Hollywood at the end made my eye roll come on there had to be a better way.