Book Club - Angela Meyer’s Moon Sugar

Angela Meyer is an author, book industry professional and teacher of writing and publishing. Her debut novel A Superior Specter was met with critical acclaim garnering a slew of prize shortlists including the Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.  Now if you haven’t discovered Angela’s writing yet, let me tell you she has an incredible power to write incredibly human stories that explore the fantastic within our world and challenge what it means to live  …and let’s face it, the world these days feel like we live on constantly shifting sands, so feeling connected through stories is a powerful thing   ------ In Moon Sugar… Mila was mourning the life she thought she’d have; house, family, the whole suburban dream, when Josh arrived to shake up her world. Josh has this way of transfixing everyone he meets. Good look and with an easy manner that invites you to open up. Mila meets Josh through SugarMeetMe and though their relationship begins in a financial transaction it opens up into something so much more. Together they explore art and music and take part in a clandestine study to make some extra money. Kyle is Josh’s best friend and he understands how special that makes him. Sure he often feels like a sidekick but because of Josh he’s growing, getting ready to explore the world. When Josh goes missing in Europe Mila follows him to try and uncover what has happened and what she has lost. There she meets Kyle, and together the two follow in Josh’s footsteps and try to make sense of his final days…  -------- Moon Sugar takes an exploded view of our world and seeks to understand the ways we are all connected.  In the central relationship between Mila and Josh we are shown a seemingly incongruous relationship of love and respect. Mila seeks out a companion after the breakdown of a relationship. She has come to realize how much she had given over to her partner and what that has meant for her understanding of herself and what she finds pleasurable. Josh is an escort and a sex worker who seeks to honour the people who seek out his companionship. As Mila and Josh come together they explore what it means to be damaged by our experiences but also how we can heal. We see that people can open themselves up and provide space for others. You’ll see descriptors like genre defying or genre bending associated with Angela Meyer’s work and I have to acknowledge that there is a hole in my description of Moon Sugar. Meyer explores human connectedness through the triangle of Mila, Josh and Kyle but she accelerates this, taking it to new levels and understandings. I don’t want to give away spoilers here but just imagine if our digital world could truly live up to its promise of world wide connectivity. If instead of just viewing a glimpse of all those lives we could come to understand each other a little better. Of course that sort of power of connection would not go unnoticed. Powerful forces would seek to control it, and there’s still the central tension of Josh’s disappearance to unravel. Moon Sugar is a beautiful expansive novel of love, both for others and ourselves, that melds the corporeal with the fantastic in a way we should all hope to discover.