Read, Run, Ramble

Title: Year of No Sugar

Author: Eve O. Schaub

Genre: Non-Fiction/Memoir

Publisher: Sourcebooks

Publication Date: April 8, 2014

Format: Egalley from Netgalley.com

Thank you Sourcebooks via Netgalley for providing me with an early copy of this book!

Synopsis

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

My review:

I abandoned this book at 79%.

There were a few things I was expecting from a book that exclaims the author and her family went without sugar for a year:

1. That the family would actually go without added sugar for the year (or maybe most of the year or at least more of the year than not.

2. Symptoms and experiences for all members of the family would be shared.

3. Not to be barraged with unnecessary ill treatment of animals and right way to eat meat lectures.

4. Not to sit wondering, after one baffling chapter, why I was reading about the author’s trip to Tanzania where she didn't eat the local cuisine of goat.

By the time I gave up on the book none of those expectations had been met. The family did not indeed go without sugar. As a matter of fact between the vacation in Italy, the birthday clause, the individual cheat they each got (to eat whenever they chose), and the monthly dessert allowance, I’d be very interested to know how many days any of them actually went consecutively without sugar.

Additionally, the only symptoms or experiences I’d read were that the girls had missed less school due to illness and that sweets were much more sweet to Eve and made her feel bad after eating. There was no talk of how any of them felt after leaving the sugar behind or any other experiences or such provided. The girls and the husband were very rarely even mentioned.

Meat – you might be wondering how this ties to sugar, so was I. The author shares on several occasions that she used to be a vegetarian. Then shortly before I gave up on the book a majority of a chapter (if not the whole) focused on the ill-treatment of animals and what the author feels is the right way to eat meat. And then there was the portion of the chapter that detailed the author’s trip to Tanzania and how she decided not to eat goat. I don’t have any other details to share on that particular point, I was simply baffled on why I was reading about it in a book supposedly about a family who was attempting to eradicate sugar from their diet.

Those were the major things that stood out to me, but much of the memoir was hard for me to read. I feel like this book is a bait and switch. Readers think they’re getting a well-informed read about the effect of sugar on our diets and in our lives and maybe some insight as how to start removing it from our diets, but what you get is a memoir with small amounts of information about sugar, some stats about it as well, and very little evidence of what it did or did not affect in the Schaub’s lives. I think at the very least, the synopsis, the jacket blurb, and the marketing should be more honest about what the book is – that’s the biggest issue.