Sugar Scars – Travis Norwood

First Published: 28th July, 2015
Genre: Post-Apocalyptic / Novel
Available: Amazon.com | Amazon UK

Sugar is a type 1 diabetic. When a virus kills most of the world’s population, she hoards all the insulin she can find. But insulin can’t be stored forever. To survive, she’s going to have to make her own.

There will be some discussion of sexual assault in this review, though no graphic descriptions.

The basic premise is something that appealed to me. It’s a different kind of post-apocalyptic survival, as it deals with how to get something that requires a society to produce. This part is handled well enough. Sugar’s diabetes is something she constantly has to remember, by monitoring her blood sugar and food intake. Producing insulin also isn’t something she can do alone. It requires a community. Though there are people who use society’s collapse to do bad things, most of the survivors are simply trying to live their lives and help each other out. This is realistic, as most people don’t actually turn into serial killers the moment a disaster happens.

The issues I had weren’t with the main plotline of trying to set up insulin production. Communities that band together and help their sick and disabled members is something I’m down with, and I wish happened more in post-apocalyptic work. The problem was everything else.

Sugar does not act like an older teenager. She acts like a child. Though her voice does mature somewhat over time, the start was a mismatch between what the text says she is (a nineteen-year-old who has been in and out of various foster homes, and living on her own since she was eighteen) and her behaviour (maybe nine or ten years old at most). At first, I thought this might be purposeful. She might be non-neurotypical. But as it went on, I changed my mind, because of the gender binary stuff.

And there’s a lot of gender binary stuff going on. Women all want babies, even the ones who say they don’t. Men are all lust machines. Sugar thinks her first relationship was as an equal and she never relied on her boyfriend, yet what is shown is her struggling with basic tasks when he isn’t there to do them. He did manly man stuff, because he was the provider. She cooked and looked after the house. There’s a constant repeating of how small and tiny Sugar is (she’s a woman of average size) that I’ve come to associate with this sort of attitude. It’s a way to portray women as being like children. Which with Sugar’s immaturity, combined together in a package that says women really need menfolk around to look after them.

Non-white people are mostly there as background decoration, or for Sugar to sweep in and rescue. It’d be nice to say no gay people appeared, but one of the characters has a backstory of being raped by his father as a child, and by other boys of a similar age. Gay people are rapists and paedophiles. There are no counterexamples to this.

That’s touching on just a few of the bigger issues. There’s basically a layer of bigotry over every aspect of the book. The author’s worldview shines through clearly, and it’s a worldview that hates people like me. I was not particularly surprised that the author’s note says he aspires to be like Orson Scott Card. For anyone who loves Card and his politics, this might be a great book. For anyone else, it’s one to avoid.

[A copy of this book was received from the publisher for review purposes]