Sugar Town Queens

Gr 7 Up–Fifteen-year-old Amandla is half white and half Black. She lives in Sugar Town, a settlement in South Africa where poor Black people live in rusting metal shacks and don’t venture out at night. Her mother works but makes barely enough for them to get by. Much of the time, Amandla feels more like the adult because her mother has memory gaps and flights of fancy. Amandla knows almost nothing about her father or either side of her family. When her mother returns home one afternoon, shaky and more disoriented than usual, everything changes. Amandla looks in her mother’s bag and finds a large stack of money and a cryptic note with an address and instructions to enter a doorway there. What follows is part coming-of-age story, part mystery, infused with dysfunctional family dynamics. As she seeks the truth about what happened to her mother and father years before, Amandla learns who really loves her, how many friends she has in Sugar Town, the vile and pervasive nature of racism in South Africa, and her own strength. Excellent narration by Bahni Turpin, especially in the subtle variation between Amandla and her mother’s voices, enhances this audiobook.