Tammy Lynne Stoner

Early in this novel the teen-aged Dara kisses the first great love of her life, Rhodie, and in a burst of insight and joy she realizes she is a lesbian. The very next day Dara overhears her uncle, the town sheriff, laughing with another officer about how the two of them had cured four women of their ‘perversion’ by raping them the night before, and in second burst of insight Dara realizes she will never be safe in her home town, and runs away.

If this sort of abrupt, let’s-not-waste-any-time storytelling is okay with you, then you will likely enjoy Sugar Land very much. I did. The novel has a level of sweetness that floats above its main story of homophobia and racism, and the sweetness blurs the edges of things, so that the harsh parts of the story never get too difficult to read. In this way it reminded me of Under the Udala Trees, another coming-of-age-while-lesbian story that was thematically true but never so violent that I needed to look away. For some stories I need this level of non-reality, frankly. A gentle, upbeat book with a happy ending sometimes speaks to me more than full-on reality, because I can keep reading. The story that unspools here is beautifully told and I felt safe within these pages.

Another thing I loved about this novel is its depiction of minimum-wage work. Like Dara I have also worked in a cafeteria, and in all-male-except-me settings. I’ll never forget some of the things left on the cafeteria trays coming at me on their way to the conveyor belt to the dishwasher, or the way it feels to hash up slop eight hours a day, or the general awfulness of men in a group when you’re the only woman around, or how your hair smells at the end of the day. This way of life is so well portrayed here that I was almost overcome a few times by bad-gravy memories as I read.

While the people in Sugar Land never feel exactly real, they do feel like fictional people I cared about, and whose welfare I worried about.… (mehr)

In a small town in Texas in the summer of 1923, Miss Dara falls in love with a girl. Terrified of what that means and what her family and community would think, she flees to the safety of the kitchen of the farm prison at Sugarland, which isn't a safe place for a young woman, but she makes a place for herself nonetheless.

Sugar Land follows the life of Miss Dara from a young woman falling in love, to a cook in a difficult environment who makes a few friends; an inmate with immense musical talent, another cook whose quiet decency protects her, and the prison warden, to a wife and step-mother and through to the end of her life.

Despite the bleakness of Miss Dara's surroundings and her situation of always have to conceal who she really is, Tammy Lynne Stoner keeps the tone of the novel upbeat. Miss Dara is simply too pragmatic and too optimistic to allow herself to do anything other than to persevere and to take joy out of what she can, from a stray cat to the trailer she'll eventually call home.

This is a novel about family, and about loving the family and friends that you are given. It's about learning to accept oneself and to accept others as they are and not as you'd wish them to be. Sugar Land is published by the very small Red Hen Press and it reminded me of how small presses are constantly publishing interesting and unusual novels, and how finding and reading books put out by small presses is always rewarding.… (mehr)