Sugar Cage - by Connie Fowler (Paperback)

About the Book

Countless critics and authors are entranced with this debut from a remarkably talented Southern writer. Set amid the sand dunes of Florida in the 1960s, and overflowing with supernatural magic and realistic humor, this is a tale of two families, best friends and best enemies for 20 years, whose lives are touched by a woman with a spirit much greater than her role as a maid.

Book Synopsis

Connie May Fowler grew up in Florida and now lives with her husband in St. Augustine. She received an M.A. in English from the University of Kansas. In addition to Sugar Cage, Connie May Fowler is the author of Before Women Had Wings and Remembering Blue.

Connie May Fowler's Sugar Cage is the "engrossing tale of domestic life, civil rights and the supernatural in 1960s Florida." (Publisher's Weekly).

Review Quotes

Atlanta Journal-Constitution Sugar Cage is one of the most accomplished, haunting fictional debuts since Amy Tan's The Jay Luck Club.

ALA Booklist A first novel suffused with the lushness and heat of a Florida night. Fowler introduces her unusual characters one by one, letting several of them narrate this muscular, mystic, and alternately hilarious, charming, and melodramatic saga....A seductive and impressive debut.

Chicago Tribune A beautiful, taboo love story.

Kansas City Star To read Connie May Fowler's Sugar Cage is to be a child, sitting on the bottom porch steps on a hot summer evening, listening to the grownups talking....Hold quiet, save it all to sort through later, but don't miss a single word.

San Francisco Chronicle Mixing magic with touches of political realism, Connie May Fowler has written a strangely beautiful novel about love and human frailties.

The Kansas City Star Don't miss a single word.

The Washington Post Startling and beautiful...Sugar Cage is bold, honest, and intelligent.

Alice Hoffman Here is a wonderful book by a wonderful writer. Sugar Cage is a true original, filled with life on every single page.

Lee Smith Reading Sugar Cage is like falling under a powerful spell. Echoes of Zora Neale Hurston can be heard in this incantatory prose.

Amy Tan Within the first two pages, you know, without a doubt, that SUGAR CAGE is the genuine article. And that feeling stays with you Up to the last, glorious page....If writing is a gift, then Connie May Fowler must have been bestowed with the gift of ten muses. I'm amazed at the breadth of humanity she writes about, the uncanny way she captures the rhythm of inner lives -- a reluctant seer of future tragedies, a disappointed wife, a Haitian caneworker, an abandoned young boy, a philandering but loving husband, a dying intellectual, a grieving widow and a merry one, a soldier facing death, and a little girt who is haunted by the ghosts of her parents' past. She weaves this unlikely community of characters into a mesmerizing story, brimming with magic, humor, and always sympathy, showing us the characters' loneliness, their prejudices, and their circumstantial connections to one another. And just when we think that love and hope have failed them all, we realize we were wrong. They have been saved-only God and mambos know how bound and uplifted by the same dream of humanity And then we know what Connie May Fowler knew all along: This is a story about all of us.

About the Author

Connie May Fowler grew up in Florida and now lives with her
husband in St. Augustine. She received an M.A. in English from the
University of Kansas. In addition to Sugar Cage, Connie May
Fowler is the author of Before Women Had Wings and Remembering Blue.