White Sugar, Brown Sugar - by Michael a Pyle (Paperback)

About the Book

2024 American Legacy Book Awards (Finalist-Inspirational Fiction Category); 2013 Reader's Choice Award (#2, The Wall Street Journal).

Book Synopsis

n 1960s Florida, two boys meet by chance while fishing outside a yacht club where only one of them would be allowed inside. One is white, from a beach-side family of moderate financial means. The other is Black, from the neighborhood west of the railroad tracks where segregation confined his community.

Despite the racial divide that defines their world, they become true friends-bonded by something deeper than either understands. Both are sons of struggling mothers: one lost to drugs, the other drowning in alcohol. Both have sworn they'll never follow that path.

But addiction doesn't honor promises or boundaries.

As the boys descend into the same darkness they'd vowed to avoid, their friendship endures through arrests, overdoses, and tragic loss. When they finally face the choice between destruction and redemption, an unexpected ally helps them both claw their way back.

White Sugar, Brown Sugar is a raw, unflinching story of friendship across the color line, the universality of addiction, and the hard-won hope of recovery. It's about two boys who lose everything-and find their way home together.