QUEEN SUGAR

Charley Bordelon is a widowed single mother who is just barely scraping by, teaching art to inner city kids and living in a dilapidated rented bungalow in Los Angeles. But when she discovers that her late father has left her an 800-acre sugar cane plantation in rural Louisiana, she suddenly sees a chance to steer her life back on course. No one in the family had any idea that Ernest Bordelon sold everything he had in order to secure a cane farm outside his tiny hometown of Saint Josephine, and certainly no clue as to why. With nothing left to lose, Charley decides to honor her father’s wishes and heads south to start her new life as a sugar cane farmer. So begins Queen Sugar, the debut novel from Natalie Baszile that charts Charley’s successes and struggles as a novice farmer, as a dedicated mother and a grieving daughter, and as an African American woman in the Deep South.

Once in Louisiana, Charley and her eleven-year-old daughter Micah take up residence in the home of Miss Honey, Charley’s grandmother and the matriarch of the extended Bordelon family. Miss Honey is a towering personality, a Bible-quoting dynamo with a quick temper, but also a woman whose generosity and love for her family know no bounds. Miss Honey believes in loyalty above all and soon she has opened her home not only to Charley and Micah, but also to Charley’s half-brother Ralph Angel and his young son, Blue. Like Charley, Ralph Angel is a single parent surviving the emotional toll of a spouse’s death, but this is where their similarities end; Ralph Angel has a history of drug abuse, violence, and petty crime, and no one but Miss Honey is happy to see him back in town. While Charley balances the needs of family and farm life, Ralph Angel-broke, bitter, and hiding from the law-conspires to claim what he sees as his rightful share of her inheritance.

Baszile has created a world rich with local Louisiana detail, and she captures both the tensions and intimacies of small town life. Charley inhabits a complicated position within the white male cane farming community, and Baszile paints a nuanced portrait of how much-and how little-Southern race relations have changed over the generations. When Charley finally discovers the sad truth behind Ernest’s desire to bequeath her the sugar cane property, she understands that her farm’s success will be a vindication for both father and daughter. In Charley, Baszile has given us a heroine who is by turns feisty, ambitious, vulnerable, and compassionate, and whose depth of emotion leaps off the page; her portrayal of Charley’s successes and failures to be a good mother, provider, and role model for her daughter will resonate with readers facing the same daily challenges. Honest, engrossing, and heartwarming, Baszile’s Queen Sugar announces the arrival of an exciting and accomplished new voice in contemporary Southern fiction.