Sugartown by Caragh Maxwell: book review
Overview: Saoirse leaves London and returns to her hometown in the Midlands of Ireland suddenly. She's twenty-four, dropped out of her college program and then broke up with her boyfriend who was also her landlord, and has no choice but to go home. She's always struggled with her mental health, and this return home only makes things worse. Saoirse falls into old patterns with old friends, drinking heavily and spiraling about her life until one particularly bad life makes her truly reckon with her choices, maybe for the first time. Overall: 4
Characters: 4 Saoirse is headstrong to her own detriment. She's unsure what she wants, but she wants forcefully, creating tension in her life with her family, her friends, her love interest. She's resentful of coming home and of her mother's new rules and new life with her stepdad and three younger sisters that are so much younger that Saoirse hardly knows them. Her best friend Doireann is still in town and pulls her back into the social scene, which mainly involves drugs and heavy drinking. Saoirse starts hooking up with Dorieann's boyfriend, Connor's, best friend, Charlie. Her relationship with Charlie isn't exactly casual, but they never label it, making Saoirse feel increasingly insecure. She's in a constant power struggle with her mother over rules, with life itself over her direction, with Charlie over the status of their relationship when he pulls away over the way she often loses control of herself at social events.
There is much time spent at the start of the novel on developing Saoirse's unstable childhood, her alcoholic father and young single mother, and how Saoirse felt pushed out of her own family when her stepdad JJ came into the picture. There's great richness in watching her navigate the household upon her return and build relationships with her younger sister,s but a lot gets lost in the time spent on this. Parts of Saoirse feel quite developed, but for it being a first person narrative, I still feel like I don't know Saoirse or understand what drives her. She hides behind a certain snarkiness even to the reader, which was a bit unfortunate. I found myself, during her spats with Charlie, empathizing with him more because while he had his faults, her jealousy would seemingly bubble out of nowhere and be expressed in impulsive, incomprehensible ways. Similarly, in disagreements with her mother, I could abstractly understand where Saoirse is coming from but also she just overwhelmingly had a bit of a bratty sensibility as the book progressed, and yes, we're all allowed to be brats sometimes, but I wanted something deeper to accompany that, especially in the first person. I wanted to see the workings of her brain, where that sprouted from and why it circuited in that direction. I wanted Saoirse to succeed, to find a sense of purpose, to grow, but I couldn't get her to ever let me in, which ultimately flattens those that fill out her world too. Besides resenting the town, it feels like we never quite crack her true feelings on anything in depth. Part of this is not knowing herself, sure, but I want to watch her work that out.
I also found it interesting how little of Saoirse's immediate past we know beyond a few brief mentions at the start of the book. It felt like her time in London, these vague gestures to incidents there, really informed the way she came back to her hometown, but this was entirely withheld, leaving a big gap in my ability to understand the context. I think that would've helped in growing an understanding of Saoirse immensely to have a bit more of her reflecting on that time in conversation or with herself.
Plot: 4 It's a classic return to your hometown with your tail between your legs and then figure out how to get out story. She starts at a low, and for readers who like a clean ending, you'll be pleased with the way Maxwell ties all her ends and sets Saoirse on the road to the rest of her life. That being said, there's not a huge amount of plot propelling the story here. Saoirse loses her way in the middle on her drive to get out, and much of the novel takes place as she just exists in town going between navigating her grandmother's ailing health and getting to know her sisters while spending her nights getting wasted at pubs or house parties. This does start to drag after a while because nothing seems to be progressing anywhere. There's not even the abstract want to move towards. I understand rendering the stasis that can come from one's hometown, but I wondered after a while how many of the same laps we were going to take. All the plot, as it was, feels baked into the last twenty pages when the book really takes off running. There's a surprise twist that disrupts the plan of escape, there's a flash forward, there's finally a confrontation of the romantic thread of the book that ends up unceremoniously dropped earlier in the text. It feels like the book hits play again, but as a reader, you're panicking cause you see how few pages are left. The last twenty pages were some of the best in the book. I love many of the quieter sections—when she goes to the lake with Charlie and discovers her grandmother's abandoned house, wobbling through the music festival, the large amount of time devoted to Christmas, but some of the repetitive scenes felt like they stole space from fully exploring these major events that are clustered at the end of the book. I felt like they should've been more towards the midpoint and played out more fully.
Writing: 4 This book is written in a very particular style that will work exceptionally well for some and turn others off the book entirely. The chapters are exceptionally long, easily spanning 40-60 pages. On top of that, the paragraphs themselves are exceptionally long, sometimes spanning the better part of two pages. This is particularly prominent at the beginning of the book that is heavy on memory and set-up. Later on, it becomes a little less noticeable because there's much more dialogue. The dialogue is set off only by dashes, no speaker tags or building into paragraphs, so it reads exceptionally fast. Sometimes, it is a bit confusing tracing back to figure out who's speaking. This makes the pacing speed up a bit, but there is a real sense of imbalance as these giant chunks of text thin out to spare lines and then back. I found the chunky text paired with the way the book liked to linger in a certain amount of repetition a bit difficult at times. I'm a quick chapters girl at heart. It is certainly a unique style that I don't encounter often, and it works well in places, but I think it will definitely hit readers very differently depending on their particular taste. I do appreciate the dedication to stylistic difference as well as the building of this particular town. I like the rural setting, and I'm always a sucker for stories where young women are forced back to square one to confront the past before they can set back out again. There's a lot to mine there.
best lines:
"I wasn't supposed to be here. That was always the problem." p. 61
"Teen Mom was one of those shows that you'd never admit to another person that you watched, yet it endlessly fascinated me." p. 67
"Growing up, she'd drilled it into me that I was never to rely on a man to give me anything except hardship and here she was, hanging off her husband's purse strings." p. 89
"Ran into my shitty dad. Got reminded why he's a shitty dad." p. 138
"I drained both my plastic cups of their sickly mixed alcohol and waited for it to slow me down so I could take more coke... I was drowning in the solitude." p. 128
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