Sugaring Off by Gillian French

Abstract

Reviewed by: Sugaring Off by Gillian French Kate Quealy-Gainer, Editor French, Gillian Sugaring Off. Algonquin, 2022 [352p] Trade ed. ISBN 9781643752709 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9781643753348 $11.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 8-12 The isolation and general solitude offered by Waits Mountain is a comfort to seventeen-year-old Owl, who was brought to her uncle’s maple sugar farm as a child after her abusive father threw her down the stairs, leaving her partially deaf. The safety she feels on their land and in the surrounding maple trees is rudely shattered when Cody, a brash, arrogant, clearly toxic but also pretty hot guy, shows up to help her uncle with the sugaring season. The timing couldn’t be worse: Owl is fighting with her best friend, struggling with her special tutor’s expectations, and reeling from the arrival of a letter from her father. Still, Owl can’t help but be drawn to Cody, especially when he reveals his own story of childhood abuse, and the two connect over that shared trauma. The past hasn’t yet let Cody move on, however, and when it shows up, Owl and everyone she loves is at risk. As in French’s other books (BCCB Grit, 5/17; The Missing Season, 4/19), she treats her working-class characters with compassion but not preciousness, with a third-person narration that shows the complications of small-town life without exploiting it for drama. Despite a sense of increasing tension as layers of Cody’s story come to light, this is more of a character study of Owl than a suspenseful thriller. Helped and just as often hindered by the well-meaning adults in her life, Owl is making sense of a world that doesn’t entirely feel hers. She’s unsure of her place in the Deaf community as someone who has only lost partial hearing and is unskilled in ASL; her relationship with Cody is lusty but leaves her feeling off-balance, especially when he treats her like a kid; and the possibility of her father’s return reminds her of a childhood reality she’d rather forget. The mystery aspect could have been left out entirely, as Owl makes an eminently relatable and unquestionably compelling center of the story in her own right. Copyright © 2022 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois