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School Library Journal
Reviewed on June 1, 2013 | Grades 5-up
Gr 5–8—Through the sharp eyes of a 10-year-old, readers experience the hardship of life on a Louisiana sugar plantation after Emancipation. Clever, courageous, and perceptive, Sugar is basically an orphan. Her mother died, and her father was sold five years before the story begins. She lives alone next door to Mister and Missus Beale, who have become her surrogate parents. Sugar wonders why she still can't do what she wants and why she still must work and live under miserable conditions. When she bec...Log In or Sign Up to Read More
Horn Book Magazine
Reviewed on May 1, 2013
Sugar, a ten-year-old African American girl in Reconstruction Louisiana, hates everything about sugar: "Sugar bites a hundred times, breaking skin and making you bleed...Sugar calls -- all kinds of bugs, crawling, inching, flying...I hate, hate, hate sugar." The work on a sugarcane plantation is brutal, and Sugar's mother died two years ago. The community of cane workers, all former slaves, is equal parts loving and disapproving o...Log In or Sign Up to Read More
