Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

A Tall History of Sugar is a story about two people, twin souls Moshe and Ariana who were born a year apart but from the moment they met, were connected by something that could only be described as beyond human learning. As they grow older, Moshe's differences within his community, the way he looks and communicates with the world as well as the mystery behind his biological parents pull him away from Ariana and his adoptive parents, and his homeland of Jamaica as questions about everything from who he is, his sexuality and what he needs to do in life to find peace plague him.

This book was very lyrical and I found parts of it enjoyable - I actually didn't mind the Jamaican patois in this book, and didn't find it too hard to understand. This may be because I recently read Fire Rush by Jacqueline Crooks which also had similar patois in it so my mind was slightly attuned to reading and translating it.

I do love the setting of Jamaica, and I appreciated learning more about the history of the people from the history of sugar plantations, and how integral sugar is to everyone who lives in Jamaica as well as the history and shadow of colonisation. Moshe and Ariana's childhood was simple and idyllic in many ways but we also see how Moshe's family struggles as well and while he didn't need much, there wasn't a whole lot to give him anyway despite his parents' love and struggles to provide for him.

I think the book lost me a bit by the time Moshe left Jamaica, and his rift with Ariana started. It felt like the plot was confused and I didn't know if the story was centered around Moshe and who he came from (which we never found out anyway), or more about the deep relationship between Moshe and Ariana which although is love, I question if it's the type of love either of them needed.

There was a lot of back and forth in the latter half of the book in terms of timeline as well, and there were times when I couldn't figure out where in the timeline we were and it took a couple of pages to catch up.

I just don't think I understood the deep message of this book, and that's okay too as I think I maybe wasn't meant to. This is by no means a badly written book and I'd happily read more from the author - it's just one that didn't do it for me.

I tried to enjoy this book, but it just didn't happen. I'm not the greatest fan of magical realism, and there is a lot about it that is of that style of writing. I couldn't even imagine what the protagonist looks like, I found the patois slowed me down enormously and got in the way of the narrative flow, and a quarter of the way in, I just wasn't gripped by the story or the characters. I'm afraid I didn't finish this one.

This is a worthy story, with writing that is very accomplished .. difficulty for me is its worthiness .. I like Moshe's girlfriend .. as she develops protective closeness to this fondling boy .. and I think ambient is convincing .. descriptions are excellent .. it just didn't entirely grab me!

A Tall History of Sugar is a beautifully written and engaging novel and I would highly recommend it to anyone.
Curdella Forbes has a lyrical writing style which captivated me from the start, admittedly the use of Patwa dialect was occasionally difficult to understand but not enough to detract from the story and once I got used to it everything was fine.
A Tall History of Sugar reads like a fairy tale at times, a fairy tale unlike one I have ever read before.
A Tall History of Sugar is about a childless couple who find an abandoned baby and decide to adopt him. The boy is unusual in appearance and is treated as someone different by everyone except for his best friend Arri.
Neither child likes to communicate with anyone but each other and it seems they are fated to end up together. A story of love, friendship, superstition and race.
“Long ago when teachers were sent from Britain to teach in the grammar schools of the West Indian Colonies (it was Great Britain then, not Little England, as it is now, after Brexit and the fall of the empire,” there lived in Jamaica, near a town called Oracabassa-On-Sea, a poor fisherman and his wife, who was a farmer and a seamstress, and one morning they found a pale child in bushes in a basket made of reeds.”
“Rachel rocked her body to and from to quiet him, while turning the little face toward her, to see further what manner of child this could be. What she saw of the rest of the face made her hide it in pity in her shawl.”
Moshe’s life is plagued by people asking incessant questions about his unusual appearance or speculating on his parentage. One of the reasons he and Arri get on so well is that she doesn’t ask him these questions, but she believes there is another reason entirely.
“There is only one other thing I need to tell you before the story begins.
The day Moshe was found was my first birthday. It isn’t that I am superstitious. I am not; I am not Rachel Fisher, but experience teaches you to read itself, and somehow the coincidence, that we were born on the same day though one year apart, seemed a sign of everything that was to come, the way we belonged to each other and the way we kept missing each other, in the one-step two-step, one step at a time. When he died, I was almost not even there, and we had been together all our lives.
I returned and found him slipping into sleep, the day after I lost my fear of him leaving me for America. Only it wasn’t the sleep you wake up from, but the long one where you say goodbye.”
“There was always an occult logic at work what cause them to fall into predestined patterns, a logic behind human control, or comprehension, and it was the same language of the universe (which Rachel called faith, that had called her to find this child when she thought she would have no daughter or son, and at the precise moment, when she had determined in her heard to leave her husband.
By this logic Moshe was predestined to welcome a superstitious man, following in the footsteps of his mother. Moreover he was destined to remain so, because he travelled and lived in many places all over the world.”

The description of the different ailments from producing ‘King Sugar’ was quite horrifying to read.
“It was Friday, the day when they joined the long lines of sick and ailing from the town and its surrounding districts, who travelled to the parishes one hospital, mostly on foot, to get treatment for ailments and wounds. The lines included women pregnant with their first, second, third, sometimes tenth, eleventh, or even twelfth child. It included men with machete chops all over their bodies from plantation disputes, children bent in the shape of safety pins from hookworm, young ones with yaws, whooping cough, measles, or mumps-the usual maladies of childhood in those times and in that place- and many young and old suffering from heart failure, blocked tube, hernia, unresponsive male organ, underresponsive female organ, testicular edema, old fresh cold, virulent fresh cold, consumption, out-of-control blood pressure, and various disorders from the surfeit of indigestion of sugar.
The extent and variety of ailments from saccharine indigestion on the island were both miraculous and unsurprising. In case this is unknown to you, Jamaica from its infancy had been a sugarcane plantation, where people perforce ate a lot of sugar or its byproducts and leftovers. Sugar in the boiling houses made the slaves drunk, the great vats of it with its liquorish smell when it was in the making, and when it was made, the shining crystals scooped into vast kegs for shipping to England, the mother country. The grains clung to their skins and got into their eyes and ears and even their secret parts – their vulvae and scrotums.”
“After the long cruel hours in the canepiece, being bitten by cane rat, sugar snake, overseer whip, hot sun and cane leaf, when they went back to their slave cabins at night there was sometimes nothing to eat but they could not eat without become sick, or rather more sick, since they were already sick in the beginning from too much consanguinity with its sweet stickiness. This is why it became a saying in Jamaica is one of two tings going tek yu – if is not sugar, is heart failure: (which might boil down to the same thing, for heart failure comes from having too much salt – salt for healing, for taste, even in your tea, salt for feeling balanced, salt for good luck, throw it behind you, salt for counteracting Obeah and the ill effects of sugar. In Jamaica once upon a time and maybe still now, we ate salt like sugar. So it still goes back to King Sugar.”
I found this kind of historical thing fascinating because I have never been to Jamaica and knew very little about it and its history prior to reading the book. To tell
One of my favourite things about the book is the way the way the authors writing style is so winding, the narrator takes her time making her point and the story has so much added detail to it that helps to set the scene.
“One more last thing. (Forgive me I am losing brain cells, and moreover I am afflicted with the affliction of the people who come from where I was born, the habit of everlasting and divaricate endings, whether in bearing record or saying goodbye. It is the fear of departure, the final line. A fear that belongs only to people whose history began in death.”
A Tall History of Sugar was a sad love story in many ways, but it was excellent and the story of Moshe and Arri will definitely be a favourite.
“It is only left to say that my part in all of this – to tell you what happened to us, in the way it happened – was always fated, though when we began, it was not only Moshe, but both of us who could not speak.
It is totally fitting that we met and fell in love on our first day of school.”
I can’t describe how much I loved this book.

I enjoyed this book. Set in Jamaica in the 1950s - 70s, the main character is Moshe, a foundling who is adopted after being abandoned by his (probably teenage) mother. There are some lyrical sections and some lovely descriptions of life in Jamaica. The characters suffer ailments that reflect their internal state - Moshe physically struggles to talk and his thin white skin bleeds easily. The book is about Moshe's search for knowledge about his mother, and about his relationship with Arri, a girl who feels like his other half. She narrates most of the book, with a few interesting asides from the author.

I was invested in the story, and wanted to know what happened next - it was sometimes a little tricky to follow the sections written in Jamaican patois, but this added to the atmosphere of the story.

A beautiful story set in Jamaica, pre and post independence in 1962. I found it took me a while to get used to the writing style and phonetic speech but so glad that I persevered. The characters of Moshe and Arri are so well painted that you feel you have met them. The story of their development and friendship is riveting and I was so sorry to finish this book. I shall be buying copies for friends

I’ll be honest, I found this book a bit of a long haul.

Set in the cane fields of the West Indies, sugar is in the background of the story all along.

The main character, Moshe, is an interesting individual – found abandoned and taken in by Rachel and Noah, there’s a lot of the biblical ‘Moses in the bulrushes’ introduction to his life; he’s also physically different to those around him, a mix of black and white, with incredibly fragile skin that bleeds at any opportunity. Moshe’s friend Arrienne is his other half, they see themselves as two parts of the same whole, and their intense connection is a key theme throughout the book.

We follow Moshe’s life as he tries to separate himself from Arrii, travelling across the globe, pursuing his artistic talents. Ultimately he is joined to Arrii and they reunite.

I’m not sure why I found the story so hard to get along with, the characters were fascinating, but there just wasn’t enough grip to the story to make me keep running with it. A sudden change of pace and style at the end of the book also took me rather by surprise.

A really well written story which is cleverly told. Mosche and Arrienne’s friendship is beautifully written about and made compelling reading. This story is different to anything that I have read for a long time. Mosche is the type of character that you want to know more about. He brings so much joy to Rachel and Noah and touches the lives of everyone he meets.

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy.

This is an intriguing book, told from Arienne's point of view, a Jamaican girl who grows up closely connected to a foundling boy, Moshe, and the relationship they hold close over a lifetime.

Parts of the book are breathtakingly written, with passages of love and longing between the different characters, but I struggled with the structure and keeping a track on how the story was developing as a whole.

Moshe and Arrienne are closer than close through childhood, with an inevitable parting as they grow, then move back together again, with the locations in the book, a remote part of Jamaica, Kingston, London and Bristol playing their parts. Rachel and Noah, Moshe's found family, provide a loving grounded background role for both the younger people, and give a real sense of the local community in which the children grow up.

As the story moves on the Jamaican dialect gets easier to understand and is fundamental to setting the pace and tone of the story, and the prose overall has a mesmeric and haunting quality in parts. Less convincing for me was the character of Betina and the role she plays, and the end of the book for me falls down with how it has moved along until then.

Overall the strangeness of the tale and the interplay of characters work well, but are stronger in some places than others, leaving me frustrated rather than satisfied at the conclusion of the book.

This book tells the story of Moshe and Arriene, who have a connection so deep - forged in childhood- that it is almost as if they are two parts of the same whole. As they grow up they are so close they can communicate without speaking. But negotiating the nature and the boundaries of their relationship becomes more problematic as they get older.

This book is very clever and not the easiest read. There is a lot of symbolism - for example of the sugar cane affliction - and there are echoes of biblestories, myths and fairy tales. Arriene narrates but she is not a reliable narrator and the narrative becomes more fragmented as it progresses, reflective of her own clarity of mind.

This is a well-written book by a very accomplished writer. The Jamaican people and locations are beautifully brought to life, particularly with the use of the Jamaican language which is so immersive and which does become progressively easier to read through the novel. I loved the main characters and although I did find the structure a little over- reaching at times, overall I found it to be a thoughtful and beautifully written work.

Rachel is childless, has an agreesive husband and is living among sugar cane workers, many ill with diseases caused by their work and sugar consumption and it all seems pretty bleak. However, she fnds a baby, likely the offspring of a rape by a white teacher on a young girl, in the rushes , just like Moses and despite his unfortunate appearance (one blue eye, one brown, sensitive skin, blond hair at the front, pepper grainy at the back) she loves and brings him up. Moshe, the boy, becomes friends with a girl at school, who styles herself as his twin and they seem to be able to communicate without speech. Eventually another girl joins them and her insertion creates issues. We follow Moshe through school, leaving Jamaica and his return. Not much happens and Moshe remains a bit of a mystery.

There was a good book in here trying to get out. However, the rambling prose, shifts from first to third person, different narrators and clunky dialogue made it all seem disjointed. There are also passages in patois which were fine but didn't always seem to fit or flow from the preceeding narrative. I felt like I had wandered into someone's kitchen and they were giving me a long, rambling version with fits and starts of a simple tale made incredibly convuloted. Nothing much happens. I didn't look forward to reading this in the evenings. It was a slog.

Wonderful, intriguing, if not fascinating form of writing. A wonderful plot too. Really great narrator which gives a great presence to the story.