Praise for Suite as Sugar
Lisa Allen-Agostini, author of The Bread the Devil Knead:
“Suite as Sugar offers transatlantic prose flavoured with ingredients from the Caribbean and Canada. Camille Hernández-Ramdwar’s prose spans sexuality, spirituality, academia, crime and history, giving the reader much to chew on and plenty to savor.”
Ifeona Fulani, author of Ten Days in Jamaica:
“Whether in Trinidad, Canada or Cuba, the characters in these stories inhabit the margins of their societies, some in search of easier ways to make money, refusing to even try to be part of a system that does not want them, while others struggle for significance and survival in brutal environments. In the five vignettes that give the collection its title, Suite as Sugar, the themes that connect the stories in the collection converge in a powerful, resonant climax. Camille Hernández-Ramdwar is a talented storyteller with a gift for acute social observation and a clear eye for cultural contrast.”
Sharma Taylor, author of What a Mother’s Love Don’t Teach You:
“Lyrical and mesmerizing, Hernández-Ramdwar’s characters in this collection don’t just lift off the page, they sing.”
Ramabai Espinet, author of The Swinging Bridge:
“Reading this collection of short stories takes you on a plunge into the maelstrom of a diverse, multicultural, multilingual, multicolored, multiracial/multiethnic city that is simultaneously complexly stratified and impossible to stratify. The stories in this exciting collection are bold, striding and strident; no apologies offered.
Wonderful pacing here – clear as daylight and punctuated by a street argot of many distinct registers heard on these city streets. There is plenty of excitement in the language employed in Suite as Sugar – moving at ease between university jargon to street boy blues, from North American black gangster argot to a range of dissimilar Caribbean creoles. Life on the edges of BEING is explored here, even a stray dog’s despairingly woeful tale as in “Yellow Dog Blues.” Hernandez-Ramdwar looks directly into the heart of things and does not hesitate to follow them into whatever cracks and crevasses they open up. And the spatial dimensions of those crevasses are vast.
The plots of these stories are by turns thoughtful, playful, critical of the social fabric of the bourgeois world, leaning into it at times, and smashing through its complacency when necessary. This is a writer with a deft hand, secure in her craft and daring in its execution.
Chupito, Salvaje, Pooky and Jeans, Doree, Terra - outsiders all, and such a range of them. I read this collection breathlessly, recognizing and empathizing with the plain humanity of these fantastical, ordinary, criminal, cruel/kind, breathtaking folk. Such everyday people, and more tantalizingly, not everyday at all. “
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