| Sugar
Rush has the potential to be an interesting,
if not original, story. Kim Lewis is a middle-class, privately
educated 15-year-old from the suburbs of Brighton, a town
on the English south coast, to whom two life-changing things
happen in quick succession: her mother abandons the family
home, and Kim has to leave her private girls’ school
and go to a local state school with a terrible reputation.
Leaving Preston High also means losing best friend Zoë
“Saint” Clements, but this trauma is soon forgotten
when she meets Maria “Sugar” Sweet, the coolest,
hardest, most beautiful girl at Ravendene Comprehensive.
Sugar
is the classic bad influence, introducing Kim to a world of
underage drinking, drugs, and sex. Lesbian sex, in fact, as
Kim falls in love with Sugar and Sugar falls into bed with
Kim. Teenage love and sex are highly combustible and it isn’t
long before our heroines burn themselves out, leaving Kim
to pick through the ashes of her first love.
This
should be a story underpinned with real emotion:
love, jealousy, the anguish of abandonment, the extremes of
joy and despair. Unfortunately, Burchill isn’t a good
enough writer to pull it off. Her characters are two-dimensional
cartoons: Kim the Deserted Daughter, Sugar the Thick and Promiscuous
Council Estate Kid, Saint the Over-Privileged Bitch, and Stella
the Monster Mother (the latter is such a pantomime villain,
you feel you should boo every time she appears).
There
is no character development; despite the implied promise of
a Rite of Passage, the Kim at the end of the book seems no
different from the Kim at the start. Things happen to her
but she appears untouched by them—not even discovering
that she might be gay gives her cause for concern. We are
constantly being told how Kim feels, but the feelings are
never described.
Burchill
claims that it only took her ten afternoons to write Sugar
Rush; it’s a shame she didn’t spend another
afternoon editing. Her sentences are overly long and complicated;
her syntax can be generously described as idiosyncratic; and
she’ll squeeze a metaphor until it squeaks. Her boast
also smacks of laziness, of assuming that because this is
a book for young adults, you don’t have to work so hard,
and that is patronizing.
Any
15-year-old who likes reading would be disappointed with this
book, and they would do better to find a copy of Helen Cross’s
excellent My Summer of Love, which tells a comparable
story but with a greater depth, compassion and believability
than Sugar Rush could ever muster.
Britain's
Channel 4 is planning to dramatize Sugar Rush in
a television series,
and to be honest, this can only improve it. In the hands of
a decent scriptwriter and a good cast, the story might just
escape from Burchill’s tortured prose.
Read
about the new Sugar
Rush series or get the
novel
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