![]() But “Sugar Land” is not so much fixated on factual accuracy as emotional resonance anyhow. ![]() In the appendix, Stoner acknowledges the unlikelihood that a woman would have found work in the Texas prison system of the 1920s, though millions already had in the state’s farms and factories by then. ![]() However, her budding attraction to her college-bound friend Rhodie is sufficiently abhorrent to earn the scornful gazes of the women at her family’s church back in Midland - not to mention a sharp cuff on the ear by Rhodie’s mother when she catches the two girls in flagrante one rainy afternoon. In February 1923, when Dara comes to work at the prison, she is 19 years old, and the concept of lesbianism was as foreign to most Texans as Aramaic. But its problematic past is not under the microscope in Tammy Lynne Stoner’s “Sugar Land.” In the Midland native’s debut novel, the prison merely serves as an ideal location, or so it seems, for its heroine to escape a potent secret: her inconvenient attraction to members of the same sex. ![]()
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