Sugar Town Queens
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4.3 • 4 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Fifteen-year-old Amandla's mother has always been strange. For starters, she's a white woman living in Sugar Town, one of South Africa's infamous shanty towns. She won't tell anyone, not even Amandla, about her past. And she has visions, including ones that promise the return of Amandla's father as if he were a prince in a fairytale, but their hardscrabble life is no fairytale.
Amandla knows her father is long gone - since before Amandla was born - and she's pretty sure he's not a prince. He's just another mystery and missing piece of her mother's past, and one of the many reasons people in Sugar Town give them strange looks - that and the fact that Amandla is black and her mother is not.
Lately, her mother has been acting even more strangely, so when Amandla finds a mysterious address at the bottom of her mother's purse along with a large amount of cash, she decides it's finally time to get answers about her mother's life. With her best friends by her side, Amandla is ready to take on the devil himself, and as she confronts devastating family secrets and pain that has lasted a generation, taking on the devil is exactly what she must do.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Half-Black Amandla Harden, 15, just wants a normal birthday without dealing with her white single mother Annalisa's "notions." In Sugar Town, a township "on the fringe of" Durban, South Africa, Amandla's family is known both because of their poverty and because of their mixed race. When Amandla finds a stack of cash and an address, she follows it, finding her terminally ill maternal grandmother and the rest of her mother's previously hidden rich, white family. Despite Annalisa's reservations and warnings against Amandla's brutish grandfather, Amandla and her Mayme want to spend time together. As Amandla learns that people from Annalisa's past thought she had run away or died, Amandla wonders what truly caused her mother's memory loss, and just where her father could be. Friends Lil Bit and Goodness support Amandla as they navigate their messy lives, helping her find her place—both among her real family, and the family she's always had in Sugar Town. Nunn (When the Ground is Hard) illuminates the struggles of a cast of strong-willed South African women who build each other up while meeting the intersections of misogyny, racism, and classism head-on. Ages 12–up.
