Unrefined, Sugar

Welcome to Meander, Tennessee, circa 1957, smack dab in the middle of the ever-blooming, mayonnaise-slathering, kudzu-swarming, moonshine-swilling, deep-frying, Bible-beating, cotton-pickin’ South. This is where the mayor runs white lightning out of the local cat house, Baptist preachers read girlie magazines and Jesus saves S&H Green Stamps. It’s also where Anrita Harrington is Dixie’s reigning chicken salad queen, Cassandra Maddox teaches her high school class plenty more than English, Sylvianne McNeil sets her cap for husband (and bourbon) number five, and, from her pillared mansion high atop the bluff, Eulalie “Miss Sugar” Saunders takes potshots with her late husband’s elephant gun. Visitors who see Meander as a picture perfect Southern town have no idea what’s simmering behind that genteel Magnolia Curtain. By the time folks gather on Labor Day to celebrate the town’s 150th birthday, longtime feuds boil over like a pot of overheated grits, stirred to a fare-the-well by the mayor’s wife, Fern Abernathy, the KKK, and none other than Hollywood movie star Robert Mitchum. Mud is literally flung, lives are wrecked and saved, arrests are made, history is rewritten and truths are exposed that should’ve stayed hidden where the sun don’t shine. Unrefined, Sugar is one wacky, bittersweet, screwball page-turner.