Review: Sweet as Cane, Salty as Tears by Ken Wheaton

Publish Date: July 1, 2014
Publisher: Open Road Media

Synopsis: A freak accident forces a New Yorker to return to Louisiana and confront her Cajun past...

There is nothing more dangerous than a spooked rhinoceros. It is just before lunchtime when Huey, the prized black rhino of Broussard, Louisiana, erupts from his enclosure, trampling a zoo employee on his way to a rampage in the Cajun countryside. The incident makes the rounds online as News of the Weird, and Katherine Fontenot is laughing along with the rest of her New York office when she notices the name of the hurt zookeeper: Karen-Anne Castille-her sister.

Fifty years old, lonely, and in danger of being laid off, Katherine has spent decades trying to ignore her Louisiana roots. Forced home by Karen-Anne's accident, she remembers everything about the bayou that she wanted to escape: the heat, the mosquitoes, and the constant, crushing embrace of family. But when forced to confront the ghosts of her past, she discovers that escape might never have been necessary.

Review: This book was a nice blend of current day life and past day Southern roots and traditions. The main character, Katie-Lee or Katherine as she is called in her New York life, finds out that her sister Karen-Anne has been injured via a Facebook post by one of her co-workers. The story weaves on that Katie-Lee left Louisiana and hasn't really looked back. She is friends with family on Facebook, some relatives she hasn't even met in person. You can sense that she is trying so hard to leave her old life in the shadows. But when Katie-Lee receives word from another sister that Karen-Anne has passed away, she needs to return home and confront all the things she is trying so hard to forget.

Katie-Lee is the 4th of 5 children, the youngest of which has passed away as well. You spend most of the novel aware of the fact that he died but unaware of the circumstances. She only stays in touch with one sister, Kendra-Sue, and you get the sense that this isn't by choice. It is Kendra-Sue that alerts her of her sister's death. When she returns home, she re-enters her family unit, meeting all those relatives she has only seen on social media and is forced to confront why she left in the first place.

This book didn't make me laugh or cry, but had true emotion behind each character and situation. I think anyone who has siblings (which I don't, so I am speculating here) will be able to relate to the banter, the struggles, and the emotions between Katie-Lee and her brother/sisters. The secondary characters of the story, her friends from New York, add their own spin to the story and are her "family" as well. Everything comes together in the last 10% of the book, and you then really realize the complexity and emotion behind Katie-Lee's keeping her distance from her past.

I can personally relate to this story on some level and completely understand Katie-Lee's desire to maintain her distance from a place that carries hurtful memories and reminds her of harder times. All in all, this was a well put together novel about family bonds and never forgetting your roots.

About the Author: Ken Wheaton was born in Opelousas, Louisiana, in 1973. Raised Catholic and Cajun, Wheaton aspired to one day be a navy pilot but was sidelined by bad eyesight and poor math skills. He graduated from Opelousas Catholic School in 1991 and went off to Southampton College­Long Island University in Southampton, New York, intending to study marine biology. An excess of drinking and (again) a dearth of math skills led him to become an English major. From there he returned to Louisiana, where he received an MA in creative writing from the University of Southwestern Louisiana (now University of Louisiana-Lafayette). 

Wheaton is the author of The First Annual Grand Prairie Rabbit Festival and Bacon and Egg Man, and is the managing editor of the trade publication Advertising Age. A Louisiana native, he lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Said Dave Barry of Wheaton¹s second novel: ³I had several drinks with the author at a party, and based on that experience, I would rank this novel right up there with anything by Marcel Proust.²

Recommended For: Fans of women's fiction, tales set in the South. Anyone with a dysfunctional family!

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

*Disclaimer: A copy of this book was provided to me by the publisher through Netgalley in exchange for my honest review.