S is for Sugar

I’m doing folklore and book review posts to reach and please a larger audience. Previous years have shown select interest in both and to minimise blogging throughout the year, I’m focusing my efforts on April.

Focusing on an A to Z of my TBR (to be read) list, each letter will have books starting with that letter on my list, a book I’ve read and reviewed (with the review!) and one of my books matching the letter with a link about more info about the book.

I chose the books this year quite randomly from my Goodreads Want to Read page. Some are quite creatively added to letters.

If you’d rather check out my folklore post for today, go here.

You can read reviews for from previous years for this letter here, here and here, and my year-end reviews here, here, here, here and, most recently, here and here.

My TBR

About the Book I’ve Read

Sugar by Deirdre Riordan Hall

I’m the fat Puerto Rican–Polish girl who doesn’t feel like she belongs in her skin, or anywhere else for that matter. I’ve always been too much and yet not enough.

Sugar Legowski-Gracia wasn’t always fat, but fat is what she is now at age seventeen. Not as fat as her mama, who is so big she hasn’t gotten out of bed in months. Not as heavy as her brother, Skunk, who has more meanness in him than fat, which is saying something. But she’s large enough to be the object of ridicule wherever she is: at the grocery store, walking down the street, at school. Sugar’s life is dictated by taking care of Mama in their run-down home—cooking, shopping, and, well, eating. A lot of eating, which Sugar hates as much as she loves.

When Sugar meets Even (not Evan—his nearly illiterate father misspelled his name on the birth certificate), she has the new experience of someone seeing her and not her body. As their unlikely friendship builds, Sugar allows herself to think about the future for the first time, a future not weighed down by her body or her mother.

Soon Sugar will have to decide whether to become the girl that Even helps her see within herself or to sink into the darkness of the skin-deep role her family and her life have created for her.

Check it out on Goodreads.

My Review

Wow. The story is immersive; one cannot help but bond with Sugar. She eats her emotions: every bad feeling can be forgotten by eating something sugary. But, of course, it’s a nasty cycle. Sugar gets bullied everywhere – even at home.

And then she meets Even. He sees the real her and helps her, saving her in every way a person can be saved. Of course, Sugar has to do the work herself (learning that confectionaries can’t fill the emptiness inside, going to therapy, and ultimately getting help), but without him giving her that push of confidence and self-worth, she might not have been ready to fix herself.

I like that though she loses weight, she stays a curvy girl – and that the weight loss wasn’t intentional, just part of healing, losing weight that wasn’t hers in the first place.

This is a real tear-jerker, the kind that has you sobbing silently while reading (no point waking the household at 2am because you couldn’t put the book down after reading a couple of chapters before bedtime).

It is beautifully written. And despite some of the horrific things Sugar has to go through, the book ends with hope.

Trigger warnings: bullying, sexual harassment, slut shaming, body shaming, emotional and physical abuse by family members.

My Book

Blaze of Glory (Irascible Immortals #5)

Remember that you can request all of my books from your local library!

I hope you enjoyed this. For more books I’ve read and reviewed, check out either my Pinterest board about reviews or my Goodreads profile. Alternatively, you can check out my reviews on BookBub. Have you read any of the books? Loved or hated any of them?

You can now support my time in producing book review posts (buying books, reading, writing reviews and everything else involved) by buying me a coffee. This can be a once-off thing, or you can buy me coffee again in the future at your discretion.

*FYI, my reviews are my honest opinion and if something bothers me, I tell it straight. How else will anything change? My opinions are based on being a voracious reader and book buyer, not an attack on the author.*