Review: Sugar Pie Guy by Tabitha True

3 stars

For ages, I've been going between 3 and 3.5 stars on Sugar Pie Guy. It gets full marks for the concept and some aspects of the execution, while other - particularly the insta-love and some of the writing - didn't work so well for me. 

It's set in 1977 suburban Cleveland, where a small, run-down strip mall serves as the centre of the local community. Roberta "Bobbie" Bell's aunt owns a business there, and Bobbie and her friends decide to hold some discos for some good, clean fun, and to help Bobbie's aunt out of some financial difficulties. But when Randy is sent to Cleveland to realise his father's ambitions of turning the mall into something more profitable, the community must rally. Even though Bobbie and Randy are on opposite sides of this fight, they're drawn to each other, and soon Randy's not sure if selling the mall is the best idea after all. 

The romance between Bobbie and Randy developed quite fast, and I found it hard to accept that they could fall in love so quickly, especially given that they are on opposite sides of the campaign to save the mall, and would be entering into a potentially fraught interracial romance (as you can see on the cover, Bobbie is African-American, while Randy is white, of Italian extraction).  

Admittedly, the latter does give Bobbie pause, and constitutes part of the continued awareness of race throughout the book. I thought this was handled sensitively, reflecting both the progress made in the decade since the Civil Rights Movement ended, and the entrenched bigotry that remained. 

The American disco scene is not exactly my area of expertise, but my understanding is that it - like many cultural phenomena - arose from the marginalised African-American, gay and Latino communities, and I was pleased to see that reflected in Sugar Pie Guy. It is together with her cousin Luke, and his DJ partner, Sal, that Bobbie starts the disco, which is always intended to be a safe space for everyone: 

“Vel [the owner of the space where the disco is being held] knows that this is probably going to be a mixed straight and gay crowd, right?”    

“Right.  He doesn’t care. He says he saw everything there is to see during the war.”  Propping her chin on her hand, she warned Luke about the house rules for a private party at the Donuteria.  “No booze, no drugs, no nudity, no public sex…”  (14%)

The distinction between their "safe, suburban disco" (23%) and other, wilder ones is something that I found particularly interesting because of similar cultural phenomena in Australia and New Zealand, from the Blue Light Discos that my parents attended and that are still a fixture for young people in some communities, to the locally renowned "Lav" dances I went to in Sydney as a young teen. 

The 70s setting was expressed in campy dialogue and writing that - to me, as a modern reader - mostly hit a good level of 'cheesily fun'. Sometimes, however, I found myself rolling my eyes, particularly at the flowery, heavily euphemistic way the sex scenes are written. Bobbie and Randy's repeated use of the endearment 'baby' also got old, but I think has to do with my distaste for that particular pet name than anything else.

But, overall, I enjoyed the way Sugar Pie Guy brought both the carefree attitudes and more serious aspects of the 70s to life. It was a novel read, and I'd recommend it for anyone who - like me - is always looking for 'outside-the-box' historicals. I think there's a lot of untapped potential for romances set in the second half of the 20th Century in a variety of setting, and I hope to see more authors taking advantage of this in the future. 

Review: Haveli by Zeenat Mahal

5 stars

Haveli is the most exciting thing I've stumbled across since I started making an effort to read literature from/featuring different countries. I have never read anything like it, and I'm not sure I ever will again, since I've gone on to read some of Mahal's other novellas and, while they are all good, none of them has the X-factor found here. 

Set in the early 1970s, Haveli is the story of Chandni (or C., as she calls herself), who has been raised by her grandmother, the widow of the last Nawab of Jalalabad. The begum subjected her spunky granddaughter to strict and antiquated home-schooling, but nothing has prepared her for Taimur (aka Alpha Male). He's the son of family friends, and C.'s grandmother is pushing for a union between them. When C.'s long-absent father returns, offering another marriage prospect, she has decisions to make, and growing up to do. 

Haveli a novella, but it's masterful. There's the spoilt, naive, headstrong heroine with whom one can still sympathise, the Alpha Male hero, who really isn't such an Alpha Male stereotype after all, the family entanglements, the mix of the traditional and the modern, the practical and the quaint, the Western and the--I want to find a less loaded word than 'Eastern', but nothing's coming to me. Subcontinental? South Asian? Desi, maybe. Somehow, Pakistani seems too small; the protagonist twice refers to herself and her family as being Punjabi, and the familiar context once again reminds me that the Partition is more a religio-political division than a cultural one.

The 1970s setting wasn't very tangible, but it was still integral. Without the political talk about Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and the possibility of "civil war" between West Pakistan and East Pakistan (aka Bangladesh), I would have been hard-pressed to guess at a decade, except to say that C. could not have been so unworldly in the internet age. I also assume that the nawab-without-a-title lifestyle that C. and her grandmother live is a product of its time, the 1970s being much closer to the days when the princely states retained technical independence under the British. 

For me, C.'s naivete was one of the things that made her narrative voice so strong and enjoyable, as was her irreverence, which was shown through in her banter with Taimur. The strength of C.'s personality means we only really see Taimur through her eyes, as Alpha Male. The nickname and the marriage-talk initially made me uneasy about C.'s future with him, but this was more the result of unchallenged prejudices than anything else. Once I started looking at the evidence on the page, it becomes clear that Taimur is a sweet bloke under all his bluster, and a good match for the headstrong C.

Towards the end of the story, C. makes an error in judgement, and attempts to fix it by dictating a plan to everyone, assuming that they will play the role she has allotted them. The lack of apologies and consultation means that she that it's only time that her strong-willed nature eclipses her likability, but the responsibility she takes for her actions also demonstrate her growth as a character, so I wasn't really put off by it at all. 

It's C.'s dynamic narration of the people and places around her that makes Haveli what it is. Mahal has managed to cram the characterisation and world-building of a full-length novel into her novella, and there really is no greater praise than that. 

However, as a final aside, I would also like to give her props for her name, which I suppose could either be an awesome pen name or a kick-ass actual name. The original Zeenat (or Zinat) Mahal - the last Mughal Empress of India - was the strong and politically astute wife of the last Mughal Emperor of India, and she basically ruled on his behalf until his deposition following the Sepoy Mutiny/First War of Independence. Seriously though, go and look her up.