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A Girl Like Sugar
"Wonderfully explicit!" The Globe & Mail
- GenresFictionYoung AdultCanada
1 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2004
About the author
Emily Pohl-Weary
16 books73 followersAward-winning author Emily Pohl-Weary's latest novel is How to Be Found (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2023).
She has published seven previous books. Her poetry collection, Ghost Sick: A Poetry of Witness, won the Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry. And her biography, Better to Have Loved: The Life of Judith Merril, won a Hugo Award and was shortlisted for the Toronto Book Award.
Her 2022 audio play The Witch’s Circle, a retelling of a Baba Yaga folktale, can be streamed at theotherpath.ca/listen
Emily holds a PhD in Adult Education and Community Development from the University of Toronto (OISE) and teaches at the UBC School of Creative Writing in Vancouver, Canada.
She has published seven previous books. Her poetry collection, Ghost Sick: A Poetry of Witness, won the Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry. And her biography, Better to Have Loved: The Life of Judith Merril, won a Hugo Award and was shortlisted for the Toronto Book Award.
Her 2022 audio play The Witch’s Circle, a retelling of a Baba Yaga folktale, can be streamed at theotherpath.ca/listen
Emily holds a PhD in Adult Education and Community Development from the University of Toronto (OISE) and teaches at the UBC School of Creative Writing in Vancouver, Canada.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
September 24, 2009
A slightly different version of following review ran in The Peterborough Examiner in February, 2005. A revised reprint ran in The New York Review of Science Fiction in July, 2006.
In the acknowledgements to her first novel A Girl Like Sugar, Emily Pohl-Weary suggests the reader listen to Courtney Love’s Awful, from Hole’s 1998 Celebrity Skin album about fifty times while reading the book, to supply the right musical ambience. Perhaps all novels should have suggested soundtracks, even if they aren’t something the characters actually listen to. There could be marketing tie-ins; when Sugar goes into a second printing, say, Love could re-release Celebrity Skin, package it with the book. Or the other way around. Pohl Weary is editor of Kiss Machine, a Toronto magazine about pop culture, and Sugar is very much a pop culture book, at least in the first half, with constant references to bands, Buffy, and hair dye line Manic Panic.
Sugar Jones, the 24 year old protagonist, is reeling from the death by overdose of her rock star boyfriend Marco, whom she’s been dating since Grade Eleven. She lives in the tiny basement apartment they shared, never having gotten around to moving into better digs even when they could afford it. The beautiful ghost Marco appears in his hospital gown, trailing IV tubes, and tells her he misses her. Sugar misses Marco too, and it’s no surprise, since the last segment of her teens and all of her twenties thus far have been spent as perfect adoring girlfriend to tortured boy genius. Prodded to get a life by her best friend Marlene, a medical student, and her mother Marsha, a New Age activist type, Sugar gets a minimum wage job at a record store, and then an internship at a television station, allowing Pohl-Weary to make some pithy comments on today’s youth labour market.
After a suitable period of time has passed, Sugar begins dating Thomas Kung, a young Korean activist/videographer. Just as Marco was a hero in music circles, Kung is an idol to legions of young activists and filmmakers, and Sugar is leery of becoming a pretty shadow to brilliance all over again. She knows she needs to find an equal weight within herself, or this pattern will keep repeating itself. She’s always been too sweet, she feels, and complains to Marsha she was given the wrong name.
With its vividly decribed alt.Toronto milieu, A Girl Named Sugar is a kind of alternative Bridget Jones, expressing the age old concerns of young women growing up in the West: the search for love, meaningful work, the right T-shirt to pair with one’s oldest but most loved jeans, the hard to find first album by one’s favourite band. Sugar is a novel that fans of Jim Munroe’s 1999 Flyboy Action Figure Comes with Gasmask should enjoy greatly. Both writers do sex, pop culture, activism and bad early jobs in a style that’s refreshingly open and authentic, as well as LOL funny.
Pohl-Weary is editor of Girls Who Bite Back: Witches, Mutants, Slayers and Freaks, a 2004 Sumach Press anthology about changing media portrayals of young women; hence the easy yet serious discussion of pop culture that informs the book. Yet, if the novel has a flaw, it’s because at the outset, Sugar is almost a synthesis of the pop culture she inhales rather than a fully fledged human being, and later, as she becomes more and more involved in the world of political activism, she becomes a deeper, more capaciously drawn character. Which is fine, because this shift in tone mirrors Sugar’s own growth and self discovery, but there were moments I felt I’d been transported from a satire into a second, more serious book. But that’s very small potatoes.
In the acknowledgements to her first novel A Girl Like Sugar, Emily Pohl-Weary suggests the reader listen to Courtney Love’s Awful, from Hole’s 1998 Celebrity Skin album about fifty times while reading the book, to supply the right musical ambience. Perhaps all novels should have suggested soundtracks, even if they aren’t something the characters actually listen to. There could be marketing tie-ins; when Sugar goes into a second printing, say, Love could re-release Celebrity Skin, package it with the book. Or the other way around. Pohl Weary is editor of Kiss Machine, a Toronto magazine about pop culture, and Sugar is very much a pop culture book, at least in the first half, with constant references to bands, Buffy, and hair dye line Manic Panic.
Sugar Jones, the 24 year old protagonist, is reeling from the death by overdose of her rock star boyfriend Marco, whom she’s been dating since Grade Eleven. She lives in the tiny basement apartment they shared, never having gotten around to moving into better digs even when they could afford it. The beautiful ghost Marco appears in his hospital gown, trailing IV tubes, and tells her he misses her. Sugar misses Marco too, and it’s no surprise, since the last segment of her teens and all of her twenties thus far have been spent as perfect adoring girlfriend to tortured boy genius. Prodded to get a life by her best friend Marlene, a medical student, and her mother Marsha, a New Age activist type, Sugar gets a minimum wage job at a record store, and then an internship at a television station, allowing Pohl-Weary to make some pithy comments on today’s youth labour market.
After a suitable period of time has passed, Sugar begins dating Thomas Kung, a young Korean activist/videographer. Just as Marco was a hero in music circles, Kung is an idol to legions of young activists and filmmakers, and Sugar is leery of becoming a pretty shadow to brilliance all over again. She knows she needs to find an equal weight within herself, or this pattern will keep repeating itself. She’s always been too sweet, she feels, and complains to Marsha she was given the wrong name.
With its vividly decribed alt.Toronto milieu, A Girl Named Sugar is a kind of alternative Bridget Jones, expressing the age old concerns of young women growing up in the West: the search for love, meaningful work, the right T-shirt to pair with one’s oldest but most loved jeans, the hard to find first album by one’s favourite band. Sugar is a novel that fans of Jim Munroe’s 1999 Flyboy Action Figure Comes with Gasmask should enjoy greatly. Both writers do sex, pop culture, activism and bad early jobs in a style that’s refreshingly open and authentic, as well as LOL funny.
Pohl-Weary is editor of Girls Who Bite Back: Witches, Mutants, Slayers and Freaks, a 2004 Sumach Press anthology about changing media portrayals of young women; hence the easy yet serious discussion of pop culture that informs the book. Yet, if the novel has a flaw, it’s because at the outset, Sugar is almost a synthesis of the pop culture she inhales rather than a fully fledged human being, and later, as she becomes more and more involved in the world of political activism, she becomes a deeper, more capaciously drawn character. Which is fine, because this shift in tone mirrors Sugar’s own growth and self discovery, but there were moments I felt I’d been transported from a satire into a second, more serious book. But that’s very small potatoes.
February 5, 2013
A Girl Like Sugar was an interesting look at a young woman growing out of the shadow of her more exceptional friends and family, mainly her dead rock star boyfriend and her activist mother. Over all the book was quite well written, creating a vivid portrait of Toronto in the early 2000s even with many of the locations' names' changed. This was also some-what it's downfall though.
The book is so firmly set in the early 2000s that despite being less than a decade old it already feels rather dated. Perhaps it is more the fault of the way the internet has streamlined cultural trends than the authors it can still leave you feeling a little alienated at times.
Sugar herself can be quite tiring to read about. For most of the book she just drifts about aimlessly with no real direction. Which I understand is the point of the story but that does not make it any less frustrating to read about. Particularly when you have such a diverse more interesting cast sitting around in the background that you could be following instead.
The reveal about Sugar's father towards the end of the book seemed a little clunky and out of place. There was no reason to bring up that he was schizophrenic except to create ambiguity regarding the ghost of Marco. Ambiguity that just does not seem to work since it seems quite blatant that he was real for the rest of the book, probably even being the one to make the soundless phone calls to Thomas.
Overall it was a decent book despite it's flaws, almost an anthem to disenfranchised youth in the urban world, Toronto specifically but not to exclusion of others.
The book is so firmly set in the early 2000s that despite being less than a decade old it already feels rather dated. Perhaps it is more the fault of the way the internet has streamlined cultural trends than the authors it can still leave you feeling a little alienated at times.
Sugar herself can be quite tiring to read about. For most of the book she just drifts about aimlessly with no real direction. Which I understand is the point of the story but that does not make it any less frustrating to read about. Particularly when you have such a diverse more interesting cast sitting around in the background that you could be following instead.
The reveal about Sugar's father towards the end of the book seemed a little clunky and out of place. There was no reason to bring up that he was schizophrenic except to create ambiguity regarding the ghost of Marco. Ambiguity that just does not seem to work since it seems quite blatant that he was real for the rest of the book, probably even being the one to make the soundless phone calls to Thomas.
Overall it was a decent book despite it's flaws, almost an anthem to disenfranchised youth in the urban world, Toronto specifically but not to exclusion of others.
July 4, 2012
I was attracted to this book because it's based in Toronto ... as it turns out, Sugar doesn't live far from me.
Definitely not a boring cast of characters! And I liked the story and was cheering for Sugar.
I enjoyed it because it was wacky and different and dark.
Definitely not a boring cast of characters! And I liked the story and was cheering for Sugar.
I enjoyed it because it was wacky and different and dark.
June 1, 2015
I think I would have liked this book a lot more if I read it when I was a teenager.
That said, I'm not sure what teenage me would have thought of the incredibly graphic sex scenes?
I wanted more ghost action. Served as a neat opportunity to approach mental health but didn't take it all the way.
That said, I'm not sure what teenage me would have thought of the incredibly graphic sex scenes?
I wanted more ghost action. Served as a neat opportunity to approach mental health but didn't take it all the way.
October 28, 2007
The activist part was out of my experience but the working in retail sure was.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews