‘Queen Sugar’ a sweet but uneven confection

Pamela Dorman Books/Viking, $27.95, 384 pages

When researching her debut novel, San Francisco author Natalie Baszile had to learn a lot about raising cane. That is, sugarcane.

“Queen Sugar” works double time as a feel-good personal reinvention story and a primer on the challenges in cultivating Louisiana’s signature crop. Though Baszile was born in California, her father’s family lives in Louisiana bayou country. Reconnecting with those relatives gave her access to the sugarcane fields and an inside view of their close-knit rural communities. Her affectionate take on small-town personalities adds sweetness to the story, though Baszile doesn’t sugarcoat the pervasive poverty, sexism and racism.

The novel begins with art teacher Charley Bordelon and her daughter, Micah, departing Los Angeles for Saint Josephine Parish, La., and the 800-acre sugarcane field inherited from her late father. She imagines the journey as a bold pilgrimage toward an Edenic paradise, but the move qualifies more as a desperate evacuation. Charley’s husband has been killed in a robbery, her dad has died of cancer and her bratty 11-year-old doesn’t respect her — with good reason, it turns out.

Adhering to the rules of plucky heroines setting out to get their groove back, Charley’s reboot falters spectacularly. Instead of the envisioned Promised Land, her field sits matted in weeds, already weeks behind schedule for the harvest. Micah grows extra prickly sharing a bedroom in the small, “raggedy” home of Charley’s grandmother, Miss Honey. Generous but outspoken, the old lady relishes headache powders almost as much as stirring up drama.

In one of the book’s most spellbinding scenes, Baszile lulls the reader with details about eating gumbo and playing dominoes in the yard at a laid-back family reunion, then crashes the revelry when Charley’s half-brother turns up uninvited. Ralph Angel, on the run in a stolen rental car, is bitter to have been left out of their father’s will.

Other hints of menace impede Charley’s attempts at farming. She discovers that rich white men run the area’s sugarcane business, a network triply suspicious of her as an African-American woman with zero field experience.

Despite the tense undercurrents, pacing in “Queen Sugar” sometimes moves like molasses. Renewed urgency comes when a hurricane rolls through later in the novel. As grating as she can be, the vivacious Miss Honey adds crackle to the air with her stubbornness and zingers, reminding readers who the real “Queen” is here.

Baszile infuses her novel with flickers of poetic detail and spot-on observations, such as the moment when Charley hears “the screech and howl of gospel preaching,” or catalogs “the hiss of insects in the trees, the creature whine rising from the gulley … and beyond that, the faint drone of cars whipping over the asphalt.”

But such capability with language makes the author’s reliance on idioms confounding. The most glaring offenders involve Ralph Angel, who feels “like a page being turned” and recalls being “so happy he thought he would burst.” Worst of all may be when he goes “to score some junk” — not quite a cliché, but a weird, inauthentic scrap of crime-show lingo. By contrast, Baszile handles the jargon of sugarcane with care, peppering the dialogue with phrases that are specific and mysterious: “first-year stubble,” “the time for laying-by,” the dreaded “grinding.”

Character types can also be clichés. The trope of the widowed adult struggling to raise a child makes sense for Charley, whose eagerness to find security among long-lost kin sets the plot in motion. News that her estranged half-brother is also playing single parent after his son’s mother died — creates trope overload.

In a memorable exchange, Miss Honey tells her granddaughter: “The secret to good cooking is knowing how to follow the recipe till you feel comfortable. Once you understand how the ingredients work together, then you can go off on your own. Till then, you’re just wasting good food and everybody’s time.”

Metaphorically, her insight speaks to the entire novel. There’s a sense that Baszile is following certain “recipes” — story formulas like the single-mother empowerment plot, the Prodigal Son parable, “The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse” — but isn’t yet comfortable mixing up such a complex gumbo.

Despite the missed opportunities, “Queen Sugar” gets props for its charming characters and enthralling, fully realized setting. Charley Bordelon’s itinerary marks a curious inversion of the classic American urge to “go west,” following the New Great Migration of urban blacks returning to the South. “Queen Sugar” doesn’t dig deep into thematic territory, but it does capture the hive-like dynamics of families. As Charley’s farming hardships escalate, there’s never much doubt that the ultimate crop will be hugs and healing — plus plenty of sugar to help the medicine go down.