Azucar's Sweet Hope: Her Story Continues
Part two of the trilogy of books from Alan Cambeira
By Laurel Johnson, Midwest Book Review | Posted: March 30, 2005
In this second novel in the Azúcar Trilogy, Alan Cambeira once again works prosaic magic as a story teller. Lush Caribbean locales, a seductive story line, and clearly defined characters kept me riveted from page one. Cambeira's style is beguiling.
Azúcar's Sweet Hope picks up several years after book one ends. Azúcar Ferrand-St. Jacques and her soulmate Lucien have formed a powerful international consortium in their efforts to attract tourists to the Caribbean. This beautiful, successful, and determined couple is protected by powerful island spirits and a seemingly endless supply of money. Despite unparalleled success in business, neither has forgotten the squalid roots from which they came. Azúcar, in particular, never forgets her childhood of poverty, exploitation, violence, and abuse. She is determined to make life better for those who must labor long hours under a merciless tropical sun. Sugar cane fields and European-owned plantations have given way to pricey tourist hideaways. Still, laborers struggle daily with unimaginable horrors and hardships that persist in their island paradise. With their latest business venture, Azúcar and Lucien plan to pay workers well, treat them humanely, and create new financial channels into impoverished areas. Their idealistic plans are threatened from the outset.
First, wealthy tourists - members of the influential Montalvo family - are horribly murdered, victims of a kreyol ritual. Sociopolitical tensions result from these unsolved murders while a displaced work force of discontented sugar cane workers rebel against decadent consumerism. Will outside forces ruin Azucar's plans? And will she betray beneficial island spirits to achieve her goals?
Azúcar's Sweet Hope is a realistic picture of what happens when greedy, racist businessmen and politicians combine forces to gain wealth and power. The result, as always, is the raping of a country's resources and ruination of the poor who serve as laborers. Cambeira writes honestly, with powerful, persuasive prose. Through his words, inhumanity and hope, beauty and sadism, love and squallor come alive in the island paradise he loves.
Azúcar's Sweet Hope is available at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Borders Books and Publish America.
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Reader Comments
Breathtaking and Fascinating,
Reviewer: Ed Carlson
(Chicago, USA) -
Cambeira is surely one of the contemporary fiction's most sensitive conveyors of Hope's Bittersweet persistent; He is a fine and a serious fiction and non-fiction writer who has slowly grown as an artist with each book he has written.
A Reviewer from Chicago.
Cambeira's true gift as a writer is not only his ability to make a story rational and historically correct: his poetic language transports the reader to the exotic atmosphere with all of the perfumes, foods, folklore, spiritualism, melodies, and lyricism of the Caribbean better than anyone writing. He certainly ranks high in the echelon of that realm of `magical realism' that too many of us thought was confined to Latin American writers' works. Stepping into the pages of AZUCAR'S SWEET HOPE is a move toward finding a paradise - if only for the moment of the book. And that is much needed! Alan Cambeira tells a fine story, fills it with wisdom, and in the end gives us all courage in the simple adoration of the concept of Hope. Grady Harp.
A Reviewer from California, USA.