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Product Details
Washington Square Press, March 1993
Trade Paperback, 320 pages
ISBN-10: 0671748092
ISBN-13: 9780671748098
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Text Excerpt 1The Washington Post
Startling and beautiful...Sugar Cage is bold, honest, and intelligent.
Amy Tan
Within the first two pages, you know, without a doubt, that SUGAR CAGE is the genuine article. And that feeling stays with you Up to the last, glorious page....If writing is a gift, then Connie May Fowler must have been bestowed with the gift of ten muses. I'm amazed at the breadth of humanity she writes about, the uncanny way she captures the rhythm of inner lives
-- a reluctant seer of future tragedies, a disappointed wife, a Haitian caneworker, an abandoned young boy, a philandering but loving husband, a dying intellectual, a grieving widow and a merry one, a soldier facing death, and a little girt who is haunted by the ghosts of her parents' past. She weaves this unlikely community of characters into a mesmerizing story, brimming with magic, humor, and always sympathy, showing us the characters' loneliness, their prejudices, and their circumstantial connections to one another. And just when we think that love and hope have failed them all, we realize we were wrong. They have been saved-only God and mambos know how bound and uplifted by the same dream of humanity And then we know what Connie May Fowler knew all along: This is a story about all of us.
The Kansas City Star
Don't miss a single word.
Lee Smith
Reading Sugar Cage is like falling under a powerful spell. Echoes of Zora Neale Hurston can be heard in this incantatory prose.
San Francisco Chronicle
Mixing magic with touches of political realism, Connie May Fowler has written a strangely beautiful novel about love and human frailties.
Chicago Tribune
A beautiful, taboo love story.
ALA Booklist
A first novel suffused with the lushness and heat of a Florida night. Fowler introduces her unusual characters one by one, letting several of them narrate this muscular, mystic, and alternately hilarious, charming, and melodramatic saga....A seductive and impressive debut.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sugar Cage is one of the most accomplished, haunting fictional debuts since Amy Tan's The Jay Luck Club.
Kansas City Star
To read Connie May Fowler's Sugar Cage is to be a child, sitting on the bottom porch steps on a hot summer evening, listening to the grownups talking....Hold quiet, save it all to sort through later, but don't miss a single word.
Alice Hoffman
Here is a wonderful book by a wonderful writer. Sugar Cage is a true original, filled with life on every single page.
Boston GlobeThe intricacy of a story that follows eight lives over two decades, together with Fowler's genius at characterization and facility with language, makes for lively reading.
Elizabeth Forsythe HaileySugar Cage is a haunting chorus of Southern voices, varying in age, sex, and color, but creating a rich and vibrant harmony that lingers long after the final page. A warm welcome to this talented new novelist!
Richmond Times-DispatchRemarkable....Some [scenes] are heartwrenching; others are funny; all are powerful.
Publishers Weekly[An] engrossing tale of domestic life, civil rights and the supernatural in 1960s Florida....Sensitive characterization and dramatic irony aplenty make this saga of a turbulent decade in a small town particularly memorable.
Miami HeraldFowler has a trusting and attuned ear. Her characters are right on the money, and their simple, lush, infuriating voices roll along on the pride, fear, sadness, alienation, struggle, and uncertainty that ended Southern innocence and isolation at the beginning of the civil rights movement and the start of the Vietnam war.
New York NewsdayThere's a lot to admire in Sugar Cage....a tale of family struggles and the universal search for love.
The New York Times Book ReviewIn Sugar Cage, Ms. Fowler has inventively worked the notion of "sweet poison" into the lives of her characters...
Orlando SentinelFowler nicely balances the mythic with the realistic, the comic with the tragic. Sugar Cage has both the sweetness and grit of real sugar.
