The Sugar Island

by Ivonne Lamazares

Overview

Ivonne Lamazares’s distinguished debut novel is "at once a deeply personal and worldly tale . . . a wonderful amalgamation of culture, politics, and love" (Philadelphia Weekly). With economical prose and a clear-eyed vision, Lamazares evokes lives full of hope but fraught with obstacles in this story of a mother and daughter in 1960s Cuba. The story is told in the brave, tough voice of Tanya, a girl at odds with her mother and with the rapidly changing world around her. In the wake of Castro’s revolution, Tanya's mother — passionate and unreliable — is determined to leave Cuba at all costs and to take her reluctant daughter with her. THE SUGAR ISLAND presents their embattled relationship against the backdrop of a country in conflict with itself, where the old world chafes against the new and where a parent’s desperate grab for freedom has dire consequences for her child.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780618154548
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	10/05/2001
Pages:	218
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.55(d)

About the Author

IVONNE LAMAZARES was born in Cuba in 1962. Her mother died when she was three, and she was raised by her grandparents in Old Havana before emigrating to Florida at the age of fourteen. Lamazares is on the faculty of Miami-Dade Community College, where she received an endowed chair for excellence in teaching literature, and her short stories have appeared in Blue Mesa Review and Michigan Quarterly Review.

Read an Excerpt

"Listen to me," Mama commanded..."This country is just a backwater plaintain grove. Now and forever." She wiped her hands on her apron until she left a dark circle. "Tanya, mija, our life is about to start." Mama always wanted to start life just as I wanted to start a new notebook at school, with neat and crisp lines, waiting to be filled in with important dates and bright colors.
She touched my arm and whispered, "Cousin Romy is coming for us. Tomorrow or the next day we could wake up in Cayo Hueso, or Me-a- me." Mama whispered "Me-a-me" the same way Emanuel and I ate ripe bananas--with greedy, sticky pleasure.

Copyright © 2000 by Ivonne Lamazares. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.

Editorial Reviews

Ivonne Lamazares’s fresh, clear voice and lyrical vision of Cuba past and present are a welcome addition to the New American Literature that’s developing fast along our borders from Miami to Los Angeles.” — Russell Banks

“Ivonne Lamazares writes of the tug of history, the wrenching of families. In an intimate voice that is distinctly her own, this novel is a kind of cross between Cristina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban and Mona Simpson’s Anywhere but Here. Writing of mothers and daughters in a world torn apart by politics, Ivonne Lamazares offers a dazzling new addition to Cuban-American literature.” — Mary Morris

“Reading this magnificent first novel, I couldn’t stop myself from thinking that Holden Caulfield had somehow ended up in revolutionary Cuba, transformed into a most irreverent teenage girl, brazen and stubborn and breathtakingly conTdent and keen-eyed, growing up in a society intent on breaking its own lovesick heart. THE SUGAR ISLAND is contemporary Tction at its best, prizewinning Tction, and Ivonne Lamazares is an unforgettable writer.” — Bob Shacochis

". . . spare, lyrical, and brilliantly observant . . . life in Castro's Cuba . . . comes across clearly in the hands of this talented new writer." Publishers Weekly, Starred

"One of the most original renditions to date by a Cuban-American writer of the contemporary Cuba story." The Miami Herald

"worth reading for its . . . courageous main character, its striking relevance to recent . . . events, and its . . . sketches of Cuban . . . life." The Seattle Times —

From the Publisher

We can only look forward to more from Lamazares, a fine new literary voice who proves again, even in these days of "reality-based" television, that a vivid imagination is much more powerful than any news story in showing us life at the level of the human heart.
— Washington Post

Joanne Omang

Political oppression, financial hardship, immigration and coming-of-age are all topics rife with potential cliches, but Lamazares gives them new life in this seductive and courageous debut.
—Time Out New York

Max Winter

While the story of Cuban refugees risking a 90-mile raft trip to Florida has become a familiar one, Lamazares' bristling debut, set in 1960's Cuba, vividly fuses one such escape attempt with an equally treacherous mother-daughter relationship...There's nothing sugary in this bracing tale about a young woman deciding what she owes her country, her family, and herself.
—Entertainment Weekly

Megan Harlan

An adolescent girl juggles the personal and the political in a debut that moves from Castro's Cuba to South Florida in the 1960s. Mirella, a flighty woman whose once revolutionary fervor has turned to disgust, has one goal: to escape Cuba. Tanya, her teenaged daughter, finds her mother's judgment (and her motivation) suspect. The most effective part of this largely successful tale focuses on the dance these two antagonists do in order to get what they want. If Tanya's goals are less defined, it's because she's young and uncertain. But she knows two things with certainty: she doesn't want to leave Cuba, and she doesn't trust her mother. In Cuba, compelling oppositions—Santería vs. Catholicism; Communism vs. Capitalism; the Revolution vs. the Reality—animate the cast of characters. Melena, a sympathetic grandmother figure, struggles for control of Tanya and Tanya's younger brother Emanuel, but she's fighting a mother and a system. Paula, the pretty neighbor, confuses glamour with freedom and finds herself at odds with the Revolution. Compañero Andres, a young bureaucrat from an undisclosed "ministry," introduces Tanya to the verities of the Revolution, but the vagaries of the heart. Meanwhile, Mirella, a powerfully drawn figure, exerts her will by appearing will-less. Her scams, though, run her into conflict with Andres and with "Lolo," a corrupt low-level official who practices a voodoo-istic Santería. Something of a plot begins to boil, and an adventure at sea ensues. Lamazares's sharp eye for the tensions on native soil doesn't fare as well in the Miami section, but the story'smomentum carries forward to asatisfying if open end. Familiar turf with a fresh mix. Echoes of Graham Greene's tropical corruption, Ha Jin's absurd predicaments, and Sandra Cisneros's stylized restraint enrich what is essentially a mother/daughter conflict.

Kirkus Reviews