Reader Roulette: The Last Will and Testament of Rosetta Sugars Tramble

Dec 8, 2011 by Colleen Turner

Welcome to another installment of Reader Roulette! For those unfamiliar, Reader Roulette pairs one of our readers with a mystery book that can be of any genre and the reader agrees to give it a try and write an honest review. Today our review comes from Brenda Bickham, who lives in Boston, MA with her family and their chocolate labrador.  She’s currently in the final throws of an MFA in Creative Writing and writes Young Adult Fiction.

And now, please enjoy Brenda’s review of The Last Will and Testament of Rosetta Sugars Tramble:

In Myra McLarey’s first novel, The Last Will and Testament of Rosetta Sugars Tramble, she weaves a tangled tale of the townsfolk of Sugars Springs, Arkansas, a fictional place first settled by Jacob Sugars, his wife and their slaves, in 1815.  The story begins in 1988 with a fire set to the local Baptist Church, a fire which jumps to the roof of the town’s eldest black matriarch, Sweety Wilhite, ninety six, an arson which is disregarded by the whites.  From there we travel back in time with Sweetie and another town elder, Samuel Daniel – both descendants of Jacob Sugars, although both black – nearly a century.  We follow the twisted branches of the Sugars family tree, and all those caught in its snare, from limb to limb, from white family to black, from slavery to abolition, from bondage to freedom, and more importantly, from owner to slave and the familial ties created by such liberties that were common back then.

McLarey’s language transports you into a richly drawn environment where, even in 1988, whites and blacks are mostly still segregated, not by law but by history and comfort, and her diction drops you into the Deep South – where we identify both the illiterate and the educated through her intricate use of words.  This same language allows her characters to simmer and boil in the moment.  Even moments of silence are palpable – broken by the ferocity of a fly swatter that caries with it a dramatic change in tempo as it is brought down on the wrath of its victim.

The limbs of the Sugars family tree, and those caught in her branches, become so thick and twisted that it’s difficult to remember who is who at times, but thanks to an intricate family tree in the back of the book, we have but take a peek to reconnect ourselves to the myriad of individuals whose lives we follow through multiple generations, from birth to death – both long and untimely.

McLarey keeps us tethered to her tree by tales of forbidden love between an educated black man and white school mistress, by master’s taking advantage of their slave women, by the hanging of an innocent black man and the hunting of another.  We are disgraced knowing that such actions are part of our national history, but then we are fleetingly uplifted by a master’s promise to free his bastard offspring from bondage, only to die before he could keep his pledge.

The story and its sense of place created in Sugars Springs is so magically woven by McLarey that it becomes a rich and beautiful living thing.  So much so that, when we come to the storey’s end, we are gladdened by The Last Will & Testament of Rosetta
Sugars Tramble which preserves this place for eternity – even if it is just a fictional land – or so we are left wondering.

Overall Rating: ★★★★★★★

Unboxed Rating: ★★★★★★

A worker bee in Tampa, Florida, Colleen spends her sparse free time living and loving with her husband and son, their dog Oliver and fish Fin, and reading just about anything she can get her hands on. She is a reviewer at www.luxuryreading.com and can also be found on Facebook at http://facebook.com/candc320 and Goodreads at http://www.goodreads.com/user/show/3339335-colleen-turner.

Colleen Turner

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