Sugar Cage by Connie May Fowler

I believe I said this when I reviewed "Remembering Blue" by Connie May Fowler. But I simply love this author. I adore her. If I could just bottle up the feelings that run through me when I read her books, I could hire a yard guy and a cleaning lady and read all day. Her writing is hypnotic, melodic, smooth and familiar. She is a Florida girl, and she expertly yet subtly weaves the essence of my home state into everything she writes, which makes her very special to me. She seems to have had quite a difficult life in her early years, which adds to the depth of her words. Sugar Cage is Connie's debut novel, a work of art that launched her career. Let me tell you about it.

We are introduced to Inez Temple, the heart and hub of the story. Inez grew up a poor black girl in Eatonville, and now lives just south of Saint Augustine and works as a hotel maid. She is a regal, wise and gentle soul. She meets and befriends the Jewels and the Looneys who are both honeymooning at the hotel, and over time become neighbors and support systems for each other. With these central characters, we take a journey over two decades. Tales are told from the perspective of Inez, Rose Looney and her husband Charlie, Eudora Jewell and her husband Junior, the Looney's son Emory, Emory's girlfriend Soleil Marie Beauvoir, the Jewell's daughter Luella, and even the local mortician Patrick Lackley. Each has their own unique, colorful voice.

This novel is a not just words on a page. It is a sometimes comical, sometimes wistful, sometimes brutal slice of humanity that comes alive as you read. We experience death, adultery, miscarriage, familial estrangement, first loves, blind devotion, friendship and reconciliation. Which is truly, when you think about it, Everyman's life.

Fowler entwines these personal struggles with themes of spirituality. Inez was raised with a general healing spiritualism, Junior worships nature, Eudora gravitates to mystical communication with the dead, and Soleil Marie, an illiterate Haitian who works in the cane fields, is a mambo with a missionary's influence of Catholicism.

In the not-so-distant backdrop of the story looms events and attitudes that shaped modern America. The Jewels and Looneys were married on the day the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Fear and confusion hovers over all of them like a dark cloud after the assassination of Kennedy. Hope motivates Inez's activism with the prominence of Martin Luther King Jr., and paralyzes her when he is assassinated. Charlie Looney participates in a protest march against blacks. Emory and Soleil Marie struggle to keep their relationship a secret from a society that abhors mixed couples. Emory enlists to fight in Vietnam.

And through it all, Fowler folds in intimate details of the graveyards and the fort in St. Augustine, eating at an authentic fish camp, a carnival in Clewiston, the beauty of driving down A1A with the windows down, the concrete jungle of Miami, the baptismal cleansing of a dip in the ocean, and the culture of the sugar cane industry in southern Florida. These are all pieces of life down here for me. I've even been to the carnival in Clewiston. This is the side of Florida that is real and raw, and what makes Fowler's stories so emotional for me, and why I wish I could send this book for each and every one of you to read!