I was pregnant once, I was 20 once but I don’t remember any of this shit… [Enjoy Your Stay: Sugartown #2 (Greetings from Sugartown)]

 I recently finished reading Enjoy Your Stay: Sugartown #2 (Greetings from Sugartown) by Carmen Jones.  Let me just be the first to say that after reading that book title I have a feeling similar to what I used to get when I worked out for like two minutes and had to wrap a towel around my neck, chug down a bottle of water and lay down dramatically on a gym mat for 5 minutes to recover.  That title is just exhausting so for the purpose of this entry, we’re just going to call the book Sugar 2.  You’re welcome.

I like Carmen Jones as an author.  The first book I read by her was Kick, it had a much different vibe than Sugar 2 but the writing was good enough that I decided to explore some other Carmen Jones material.

I learned an important lesson about myself about half way through Sugar 2. Somewhere along the way in life, I grew up.  As fucked up as that is, it’s my new reality, I’m grown.  The first downside to being a grown ass woman is my ridiculously limited capacity to be entertained by youthful melodrama.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve read several books with extremely young heroines (we need a whole separate blog post to discuss that phenomenon) but depending on the plot and writing style of the author, we can often and mercifully forget that the characters are barely out of high school.  Not the case in Sugar 2.

I forgot, but apparently Carmen Jones didn’t, that when you’re 20, you never say what you mean and a 20 year old man never knows what he means.  So if you write a book about the relationship between two characters in this age range and you actually care about an accurate depiction, you have pages and pages of arguing where nobody is saying what they mean.  How do we know this? Because we as the readers have the unfortunate pleasure of being privy to the thoughts of the characters as well as their dialogue.  I swear, I had a migraine the size of Alaska by the time this book was nearing the finish.

It’s not that Sugar 2 isn’t well written, but being trapped inside the mind of a 20 year old pregnant chick, her boyfriend, and baby daddy is a nightmare of 16 & Pregnant proportions. 

Read my full review here :

LJ Sugar 2 Review