Sugar Kids is a very special kind of book. It’s not the kind of book that I would usually go for, but this book was striking enough for me to pick it up. Both visually striking, and in the title. In choosing this book, I didn’t really pay a whole lot of attention to the synopsis, I knew it was about a girl living in Vancouver during the 90s, during a very prominent rave era. So I didn’t really know what to expect because this is about a time period that I didn’t grow up in, a city that I don’t live in, and a lifestyle that I’ve never experienced. Looking back, maybe I should have paid a bit more attention to what the book contained.

Let’s get into it. Because I have a lot of thoughts! Some context for the book is that our main character’s name is Baby, she’s a skater and an avid lover of Victorian gothic fiction, she’s also a former twin until her twin brother died when they were young. Her mom died as well, so now she’s living with her father who hates her. One day she meets Delilah, Delilah introduces her to drugs like ecstacy and rave parties, soon enough Baby falls in love with this new lifestyle she’s found.

Here’s what I do understand. This is a story of transformation. Showing someone like Baby at her lowest, going lower, and then eventually making her way up to the top. Grieving the loss of her mother, and by default the loss of her twin brother, she is at a very low point in her life. Then she finds Delilah, they go party and do drugs, and suddenly Baby is swept up in this new rave culture. As Baby goes through these lifestyle changes, there are multiple voices of reason in her life, like her friends and her guidance counsellor. But she doesn’t quite feel whole because her twin brother is gone. Let me explain this one, because it’s a lot more complex than you might think.

Baby’s twin brother Ravi died, but he didn’t quite die. With them being twins, Baby explains that she’s got a sort of split personality now. It’s like parts of Ravi have been absorbed within her, but he also comes to visit her in ghost form… It’s interesting how her relationship to Ravi was explored in this book, I didn’t really understand it. On the back of the book it says Baby is prone to hallucinations (only once she takes drugs, I believe), but it’s also said that Ravi isn’t really a hallucination because she’s absorbed him and they’ve both moulded into one person now. Very strange. Maybe I don’t understand because I’m not a twin and I’ve never hallucinated before.

Some things that I really didn’t like about this book was the sex scene between a minor and adult, and how lifestyle choices like these were portrayed. Although Baby eventually quits drugs, I didn’t feel that she was 100% a changed person. I also didn’t love how this book is not supposed to be a warning against this kind of lifestyle, but an homage to it. However, it doesn’t really promote rave culture or anything like that either, going off of all of Baby’s terrible experiences and multiple friends warning her against it.

Do I think that I’m the target audience for this book? In a way, yes, I do. As I mentioned, it’s a story of how a teen turned her life around. In the midst of questioning her identity and trying to put on an entirely new persona, to trying to erase a part of her that once meant the world to her, she slowly comes back to the things she once loved and valued. I think that’s a valuable lesson for anyone to learn. That being said, is this book 100% moral? No. A good majority of it was stuff that I didn’t enjoy reading about. I find that this book doesn’t exist for the purpose of entertainment, but to teach a lesson. So yeah, I think it’s safe to say that my favourite part of this story was the ending. The journey to get there was messy, but that’s what it’s supposed to be like.

In this love letter to the subcultures of her childhood, wearing the stylized masquerade vizard of a novel, Taslim Burkowicz places the reader as the observer in the back of the mind of a young woman, growing up in acidcore 90s Vancouver, as she is whirled up in the storm of party drugs, skater kids, sexual discovery, and all the other gales by which the youth with nothing to call home are plucked up and throttled for all they're worth. Baby, the viewpoint character of Sugar Kids, is a perfectly crafted protagonist by way of manner, correlating to Burkowicz's incredibly internalist writing style, provides a viewpoint for the reader bespokely suited to exploring the milieus, social and emotional, familiar and alien, that this novel was designed to show us.

In the prose of Baby's internal dialogue, Burkowicz also demonstrates a remarkable skill at maintaining unique characterization, even when the very same character is taken to far different extremes of their human experience. Whether Baby is being forced to spend time with her judgmental family, shooting the breeze with her skater boy friends, quietly exchanging jabs with her ghostly twin brother in a moment of solitude, or high out of her mind on designer drugs snorted off a toilet paper dispenser, whilst she may externally demonstrate wildly different sides of herself to the world around her, she never feels like a wholly different character. As such, through Burkowicz's prose and character writing skill, the reader is able to truly follow Baby through the many facets and faces of her life, as if she were a chipped animal set free back into the wild, for we as scientists to track and study her behaviour, environment, and journey.

Sugar Kids manages to be many things, in its relatively brief novel length and snapshot-style chapters. It's a love letter to the feeling of being young and impressionable in 90s Vancouver, a raw and heartfelt confession of the inevitable shortfallings of the young, and a hilariously cringe-inducing exploration of a young woman as she figures out who she really is. Most importantly, and primarily, though, I would describe Sugar Kids as an exploration of defining your reality by exploring its borders, and what lies beyond them, as all young people, regardless of culture, subculture, or generation, must do.

Due to rather obvious thematic and content reasons, I would not suggest this book to younger readers. However, for the more mature and/or experienced of readers with interest: