Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Annelie Geissler
Categories
Children’s, Teenage & Educational

SUGAR TOWN QUEENS

Malla Nunn

From Los Angeles Times Book Prize Award winner and Edgar Award nominee Malla Nunn comes a stunning portrait of a family divided and a powerful story of how friendship saves and heals.

When Amandla wakes up on her fifteenth birthday, she knows it's going to be one of her mother's difficult days. Her mother has had another vision. This one involves Amandla wearing a bedsheet loosely stitched as a dress. An outfit, her mother says, is certain to bring Amandla's father back home, as if he were the prince and this was the fairytale ending their family was destined for. But in truth, Amandla's father has long been gone--since before Amandla was born--and even her mother's memory of him is hazy. In fact, many of her mother's memories from before Amandla was born are hazy. It's just one of the many reasons people in Sugar Town give them strange looks--that and the fact her mother is white and Amandla is Black. When Amandla finds a mysterious address in the bottom of her mother's handbag along with a large amount of cash, she decides it's finally time to get answers about her mother's life. What she discovers will change the shape and size of her family forever. But with her best friends at her side, Amandla is ready to take on family secrets and the devil himself. These Sugar Town queens are ready to take over the world to expose the hard truths of their lives. Malla Nunn was born and raised in Swaziland. Her adult crime books have earned her two Edgar nominations and a RUSA Award for Best Mystery Novel. Her first young adult novel, When the Ground is Hard, won the L.A. Times Book Prize for Young Adult Literature and the Josette Frank Award for Children's Literature. After earning a master's degree in Theatre Studies, she dabbled in acting in New York City, worked as a cocktail waitress, a nanny, a bookseller, and on film sets, but never at the same time. She also made short films and an award-winning documentary, Servant of the Ancestors, before surrendering to her passion: writing books. She married in a traditional Swazi ceremony. Her bride price was eighteen cows.

Available products
Book Published 2021-08-03 by G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Reader

Comments

This descriptive, fast-paced narrative is a compelling read that is difficult to put down. Read more...

AUS: Allen & Unwin

Complexities of race and racism in Mandela's freed South Africa are handled with realism and strength, both in Sugar Town and the sudden dichotomy of Amandla's life. Abandonment, poverty, parental illness, friendship, first love, unexpected allies, and sexual harassment are some of the topics woven into the whole, but it is the resilient community that is front and center in Nunn's unique and detailed setting. Readers will cheer Amandla as she discovers who she is and where she came from in this captivating book.

SUGAR TOWN QUEENS is one of PopSugar's Best YA Books of August Read more...

Beautiful writing, great characterisation. A complex examination of race, class, family and patriarchy in modern South Africa. Anyone who thinks YA is a lesser genre needs to read this.

The amazing community of their township, Sugar Town... is one of the strongest aspects of the story... a narrative that shows a young woman reckoning with possible paths lying ahead and harsh judgments of women's behavior... This origin-story mystery... [is] engrossing to the end.

Amandla's story is a rewarding blend of high melodrama and gutsy realism, and...is compelling... In a novel whose subtextual message is the power of women, readers unfamiliar with South Africa may also be struck by the view into a society still highly stratified following the end of apartheid, while rooting for Amandla and her compatriots to upend the old order.

Explosive, long-buried family secrets lie at the heart of Malla Nunn's vivid and arresting Sugar Town Queens, but so do friendship, hope and the promise of love.

Sugar Town Queens is the story of a place and a family divided. It is the story of friendship and first love. Most of all, it is a powerful tale of three generations of women who join forces to fight against prejudice and violence.