The Taste of Sugar

The book tells a sad story. The sentences are short and simple. The subject verbed. Then, an event happened. Sometimes there is a conjunction, perhaps a simile, and the reader—eager for a compound sentence—stumbles at first before greedily devouring it, not even savoring it, too starved to remember that the next one will be a long time coming. There are declarative sentences for many more pages. The majority of the pages have such sentences.

I'm not entirely sure how or why I made it through. The characters are unidimensional, the chemistry between them unexplained, their relationships simply narrative devices with no depth of feeling. Vera has a story to tell, and it's a fine one, just not very engaging. I got the sense that she learned a lot during her research and wanted to cram every last bit in: history, landscape, idioms, politics, oppression, tragedy... leaving little room for depth or emotion.