Book Review: Looking for Love: The Shocking Story of a Desperate Child and the Woman Who Listened by Sugar Jones

My rating 3.5 out of 5

Warning: This review contains spoilers.

This is a true story telling the life of Sugar born in the ghetto slums of Kingston Jamaica, her life there and her transition to the UK.

The story starts in the early 90's and tells the tale of Sugar right up until spring of this year [2008]. This girl has a hard life, one I've never endured, not even close. Her mother is straight up trash there is no other word for it. She sells her body, she sells drugs and she expects her daughter to do the same in order to make money for the family and 'keep' her mother who is tired of looking after her three children.

A mother who seemed to love the men in her life who didn't have an ounce of respect for her, one of them stabbing her in the stomach when she was seven months pregnant only to let him back in the house and back in the bed shortly after. I mean seriously, you end up reading this book like WTF is going on here what kind of a woman is this. The kind of woman who beats her eight year old daughter after she's repeatedly raped by the gardener and her mother yelling all kinds of names at her and telling her she asked for it.

You're grateful when Sugar seems to gather together a little sense in her teens and put herself into foster care. I would have disowned my mother and brothers if I had family like that. I was hoping Sugar would tell her mum to fuck off once and for all when her mother wanted her to sleep with her boyfriend to have a baby for them both as the mother was too old at 46 and told Sugar she 'had good genes' after having a child of her own with a no good drug dealing woman beater named Hotride at nineteen. Simply put Sugar is ghetto and so is her mother. They lived a ghetto lifestyle and paid the ghetto consequences.

In a nutshell at the end of the book you are hoping for some peace for this girl. She tells the reader she's fine and will be fine but you have a feeling that she won't be. That she's not yet strong enough at twenty one and two children later to stand up to those around her. The baby father was deported back to Jamaica after a stint in jail and her mother was in jail at the end of the book, her brothers, well they grew up to be two little thugs in South London and you have a feeling if they're not dead already then they will be soon. I don't have much hope for them. It will be a miracle if they do a 360. The sad thing is there was no closure in the book. Sugar is still out there two children later and after having an insight into her life for 368 pages you can't help but be concerned for her and hope that she's doing OK, making wise decisions and good choices for her and her children. Hoping she escapes everything negative that has held her back and contributed to her writing this book. Hopefully she can read her story and learn from it, and life like she described in the book where choosing which lane in Dover to take to visit her boyfriend in prison, you hope that she ends up taking the right path once and for all.