A Tall History of Sugar

Starred review from June 17, 2019
In her immersive modern fairy tale, Forbes (A Permanent Freedom) unspools an unlikely love story as well as a haunting, hypnotic piece of postcolonial Jamaican history. A strange newborn baby is found in a basket in 1958 and adopted. Ghostly pale and fragile, with hair that is part blond, part black, Moshe Fisher is deemed an outsider by his peers until, on his first day of elementary school, he meets Arrienne Christie, a slightly older girl who shares his intellectual aptitude and aversion to speech. Arrienne is also the novel’s narrator, interjecting and opining with verve as she and Moshe come of age—she a burgeoning political mind, he a talented visual artist. Their slow-burning love story is tested when Moshe’s desire to learn more about his biological father takes him to Britain. Arrienne’s recount moves in hopscotch fashion, but it’s driven forward by her enchanting voice, to which Forbes brings an electric lyricism. Her dialogue beautifully captures the lilt and variety of Jamaican patois: “If yu lef outa dis house tonight, don’t come back, stay by yu fadda.” Forbes’s ambitious, fantastic tale will appeal to fans of multigenerational sagas
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Starred review from August 1, 2019
A tale of love and struggle that crosses decades and continents. This is Forbes' (Ghosts, 2014, etc.) fifth work of fiction, and she writes with the confidence and poetic nerve of a seasoned veteran. In 1958, four years before Jamaica's independence from Britain, a woman named Rachel finds an abandoned baby in a wicker basket. She names him Moshe, or Moses, and raises him as her own. Moshe was born with skin that had not yet fully developed. He's neither black nor white. He's bluish, with his veins visible beneath his thin, translucent skin. One eye is blue and the other is brown, and the hair on the front of his head is bleach blond while the hair on the back is black. Moshe's appearance marks him: "The child seemed to represent some kind of perverse alchemy that had taken place in the deep earth, between tectonic plates, where he was fashioned. People said the boy just looked like sin. Big sin at work when he was made." As a child, Moshe's only friend is Arrienne, who in many ways is all that Moshe is not. She is loud, assertive, strong, and, in later years, becomes a political activist. He is solitary, insecure, and quietly artistic. Yet the love between them stretches across decades and follows Moshe as he leaves Jamaica and finds fame as an artist in England. Forbes lets her novel sing with all the languages of Jamaica and Britain. She has an uncanny knack for patois and dialect, including Jamaican English, the Queen's English, and everything in between. In some ways this book tells a story of a love too deep to become romantic. In other ways it's a novel of colonialism and its tragic aftermath of racism and economic despair. But most of all, the book is a journey. The characters so vivid, their depictions so intimate, that the skin of the pages themselves almost pulse beneath the reader's fingers. A powerful journey into the souls of two lovers, two countries, and the people caught in the wakes of empires.

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Starred review from September 1, 2019
Rachel, a childless Jamaican fisherman's wife, discovers a baby in a basket, wrapped in swaddling clothes, whom she names Moshe. Milky white with African features, hair blonde and straight in front and black and kinky in back, Moshe eventually forms a mysterious bond with dark-skinned Arrienne Christie, the princess of a prominent family cursed with a fiery birthmark on their bottoms which become inflamed during the sugar cane harvest. The two grow up along with their country as Jamaica struggles toward independence in 1962. Forbes' novel, rich in metaphors and biblical and fairy-tale allusions, explores the cyclical nature of birth and death, and the overwhelming and terrifying power of love. It is also a forceful critique of colonialism, peopled with white Britons lamenting the lost pearl of the Empire as Jamaicans are literally poisoned by cane sugar, its principal export. This, too, makes the point: as the fields are burned clear of underbrush, the black soot floats through windows and doorways, soiling chenille bedspreads and the pristine white of lace doilies artfully strewn on tables. Born to this complicated heritage, Moshe and Arrienne discover their voices in art and social protest as Jamaica grapples with independence and identity. A fascinating post-colonial blend of romance, social history, and myth.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)