Wow. I finished the book last week and I'm still thinking about it, so I thought I would write a review.

The Sugar Island is a memorable book. It's one of those stories that leaves you staring and stroking the book cover. What's so great about it? Well, the writing style for one thing. Very alive, and real. The imagery the author invoked really put you in revolutionary Cuba. You can almost smell the place. The story is narrarated by a teenager named Tanya. Their is alot of dialouge and it's written in a very interesting way. The book is in English but you almost feel like you are reading Spanish.

The relationship between Tanya and her mother, set in revolutionary Cuba presents a back drop for a multitude of questions about the human condition.

I'm going to read it again, which will be easy because it's short. But I could have read 500 words of this story.

The Sugar Island tells the story of a mother and daughter trying and finally succeeding in escaping Cuba for Miami, and all the difficulties of life in both places, but beyond that the voice and tone is fresh and original. The harsh realities of life in Cuba are fleshed out in the day to day life of the 15-year-old narrator, Tanya, her family, and the people she knows. Although the story is set in the 1960's, is is very relevant to today. Lamazares has a way of making even lives and places that have nothing sing out with poetry on every page. Yet she also relates each hardship in a straightforward way that calls out for compassion and never sentimentalizes. These are memorable characters and a top literary voice on Cuba and Cuban emigrees. It's a short book, so there are no excuses. Read it! Highly worth the effort.

I found myself emotionally enwrapped in this book, a first novel that mostly lives in Cuba. It is told by a girl named Tanya, who exists in a struggle with her mother, a woman who is a painfully ambitious, helpless dreamer, who hates to work, who hates this world of drudgery, and who seeks always to defiantly escape. Within the novel, the mother grows into a giant figure, huge like the island of Cuba itself. Tanya attempts to evade her, but her mother's too giant.

I found this mother a doomed, sexy puzzle; I began to share Tanya's dirty frustration and fury.

The book has very alert politics; as I read it, I thought "this may be the most objective book ever written about Cuba." The petty, almost benign bureaucracy that runs this "revolution" is lovable, sort of -- not as gruesome as the menacing Russians. An island will always have a more attractive nationalism than an empire.

But Cuba is also squalid and obtuse.

Has anyone else written so well about the disappointment of an immigrant who leaves a difficult, miserable life for the featureless prosperity of Miami?

And Tanya's sexual discoveries, at age 15, are mysterious and almost botanical.

[Also I always wondered what the adherents of Santeria intuit, and sense.]

The book is written in very clear, spare prose, and some of the end-lines of the chapters are formidable and sharp, like the sound of a glass cracking.