The Sugar Maple Grove ARC Review

 The Sugar Maple Grove by John E. Espy

Publication Date: June 2020

American Southern Gothic, Historical Fiction

Thanks to Open Books Publishing for providing an e-arc of The Sugar Maple Grove in exchange for an honest review.

The Sugar Maple Grove follows the inhabitants of the rural coal mining town of Van Lear, Kentucky over the course of generations as mining accidents, white supremacy, and murder affect everyday life. Similar in content to The Devil All the Time and narratively to East of Eden, The Sugar Maple Grove is a novel that you will know within the first chapter if it is right for you.

I must begin this review with a strong content warning. Explicit racism, misogyny, ableism, violence, sexual assault and toxic masculinity are all causally woven into the text. While novels normally include explicit material to develop themes and explore the nuances of a particular issue, the constant violence and use of the n-word among other things in The Sugar Maple Grove seemed to be only used for shock value. 

The writing of The Sugar Maple Grove is stark, yet bland. Despite a large cast of characters introduced throughout the novel, very few are expanded upon and the lack of dialogue makes the novel a lot of “telling” without actually ever “showing.” The effect of the excessive exposition made The Sugar Maple Grove feel more like a jumble of short story ideas instead of one coherent novel. 

As a non-American, I found that some of the more extreme parts of the book felt unrealistic due to my lack of familiarity with the setting. While I have no doubt that everything these characters went through has actually happened at some point in American history, more context and explanation for character motivation would have been helpful to my overall understanding.

One aspect of The Sugar Maple Grove that I thought was extremely relevant was the novel’s discussion of how coal company’s exploit workers and how religion causes prejudice. Despite the novel taking place around a hundred years ago, the issues remain relevant.  

Rating 1/5: The writing and character work of The Sugar Maple Grove made for an overall lifeless novel.