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The BookBrowse Review
The BookBrowse Review
Published February 12, 2025
ISSN: 1930-0018
The BookBrowse Review
Published February 12, 2025
ISSN: 1930-0018
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A young woman's seasonal job working a sugar beet harvest takes a surreal turn in this surprising and vivid debut.
Elise and her boyfriend, Tom, set off for Minnesota, hoping the paycheck from the sugar beet harvest will cover the rent on their Brooklyn apartment. Amidst the grueling work and familiar anxieties about her finances, Elise starts noticing strange things: threatening phone calls, a mysterious rash, and snatches of an ominous voice coming from the beet pile.
When Tom and other coworkers begin to vanish, Elise is left alone to confront the weight of her past, the horrors of her uncertain future, and the menacing but enticing siren song of the beets. Biting, eerie, and confidently told, Beta Vulgaris harnesses a distinct voice and audacious premise to undermine straightforward narratives of class, trauma, consumption, and redemption.
You Are a Sugar Beet
You have spent months becoming: pushing yourself free of hard shell, snaking your newborn fibers through the soil, sprouting leaves, amassing, absorbing, aliving yourself into something fat and bulbous and full of candied potential. You are already a survivor. You were not consumed by sugar beet maggots. You did not succumb to root madness. All that good, hard, organic work, just to wind up dead and frosted over on concrete. Not even any dirt beneath you to remind you of home.
Some say you can feel it when the machines exhume you. When your leaves are sliced off and your taproot is plucked from the ground, ripping out all your lateral roots with it. That it is a kind of pain. We don't care if you can feel it or not. We're going to do it anyway, because we are more important than you. We are your creators. We wanted certain things from you, and we made it easy for you to give us those things. It was not manipulative. It was for your own good, your species propagated like a prairie fire, more than you could have managed on your own. You are bigger, too. Heftier, and denser. You are primed for sweetness in ways that would baffle your ancestors. At some point you stopped being purely natural. When you are the way we made you, you are the way we want you. This is symbiosis: replaceable things are happier than rare things, because replaceable things do not go extinct. You have no choice but to trust us on this.
The question, ultimately, is why. You are not cheap: land and water, furnace maintenance and good press, pest control and payroll. We are one corrupt EPA inspection away from becoming another Michigan Sugar, $13.2 million in revenue kissed goodbye. Why spend so much money to bring you to life, then kill you, five billion times over? Why carve you up, boil you, dismember you, shave you into strips, rupture you, and beat you to a bland pulp? How did you go from a wrinkled clay-coated seed to a monstrous corpse, bled of all worth, subsumed into a greater mass of vegetal waste, a product of duplication rather than reproduction? What is so special about that other part of you, the part we siphon off, crystallize, and purify for profit?
It's sugar that we want. We want the soft and supple sweetness. We want those tiny dissolvable bodies. We want enough of it to rot our teeth away. We want every cell to bloat with energy, we want all the dopamine released at once. And, yes, of course, such a fierce want will cause suffering. If the price paid to indulge this hunger seems high, that's only because you haven't yet accepted the impossibility of overcoming it. There is no overcoming it. It's lust: innate, insatiable, as deep and earthen as a grave.
Excerpted from Beta Vulgaris by Margie Sarsfield. Copyright © 2025 by Margie Sarsfield. Excerpted by permission of W.W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Beta Vulgaris, the debut novel by Margie Sarsfield, has a deceptively simple plotline: twenty-something Elise and her boyfriend travel from Brooklyn to Minnesota to help out with a beet harvest. They're always struggling for money, and this way they can make enough quickly to cover their rent for a few months. The two seem like a fairly typical Brooklyn hipster couple (Tom is in a band) — their only point of conflict being an argument about whether or not to spend money on a hotel en route. Upon arrival at the camp, they meet the other workers, "crust punks and trustafarians," who are really friendly.
And yet, this manages to turn into a surreal narrative of self-starvation and sugar beet body horror, with a wormy dog and the Bob Seger song "Midnights" threading in and out (as well as a fast-food Italian restaurant called Spaghett About It). Perhaps the novel is most accurately described as an anxiety story: when Elise learns that the aforementioned hotel mistakenly charged her for someone else's long phone call, causing her bank account to overdraft, she begins to spiral. She can't bring herself to tell Tom about the money or to even call the hotel, instead letting her negative bank balance define her worth. Admittedly, I found that achingly relatable, as I did her overall musings about money:
"That lie, if it was a lie, was nothing compared to Elise pretending to be a responsible adult. She felt guilty. She really should check her bank account, open that haunted little app that only ever served to tell her she'd fucked up that month, shouldn't have made that second trip to Trader Joe's, didn't need that ironic vintage T-shirt."
I'm including a trigger warning here — this novel has a lot of eating disorder related content. Throughout the book, Elise purges, lists the calories of every food item she mentions, and comes up with strategies to make food less appetizing (i.e., telling herself that noodles are worms). Her deprivation is so well-rendered that my heart hurts for her as she declines offers of help with this or that, over and over. As someone unafraid to ask for help, I have a lot of sympathy for those who feel they can't, and I understand how deeply ingrained their self-subsistence is.
As the novel progresses, people begin to go missing from the beet harvest camp, most notably Tom. No one really searches for them, and the police don't get involved. But instead of making this about missing persons, Sarsfield focuses more on the facts of their absence. Elise tells Tom's mother and his friends what she knows but she doesn't go looking for him. Instead, she remains at the campsite and worksite, wearing laundry he left behind while working her shifts. When people disappear, it's not like it is in horror movies where a killer is eventually revealed. Instead, it feels somehow passive; absences are noted rather than felt. Which is not to say that everyone is callous. In fact, one thing I enjoyed about this book was that the characters are generally likable, though flawed in the ways that crust punks and trustafarians and Brooklyn hipsters can be.
Ultimately, the disappearances can't be the focus, since Elise's deterioration is the point here. Tom has left her stranded on this beet farm, starving, working all night with harvesting machines, with an overdrawn bank account and a mysterious rash-turned-bruise. I admire the author's attention to detail and how adeptly she varies her prose to show Elise's decline. While the third person limited point of view is very effective, I did hope the author would include some details about the resolution from a more trustworthy character.
I didn't close the book with a sense of resolution or satisfaction. Instead, I was sure I felt soil and bugs on me. (Thankfully all symptoms were psychogenic.) I felt frenzied as well, equal parts because I wanted to help Elise and because the author had written her decline so well. Truth be told, I don't mind a book doing these things to me because it shows the visceral power of the writing. Even if I can never really explain the book, Elise's story will cling to me like dirt on a sugar beet.
Reviewed by Erin Lyndal Martin
Danya Kukafka, author of Notes on an Execution
Kathryn Harlan, author of Fruiting Bodies
Nick White, author of How to Survive a Summer 
In Beta Vulgaris — titled after the scientific name for sugar beets — workers come to Minnesota from across the country to work long shifts on big machines called pilers to harvest the crop. Is that what you picture when you hear the term "sugar beets"? Me neither — I always imagined deep red or borscht, but as it might appear in Candyland, and I assumed you plucked it from the ground like an earthen lollipop.
Alas, the sugar beet comes in the more humble form of a brown root vegetable that pretty much looks like a bigger carrot. All beets belong to beta vulgaris — which just means "common" or "ordinary." (Sorry.) They're usually around a foot long and weigh 2-5 lbs. Looking at photos of the drab, starchy inside, it's hard to imagine anyone realizing there is actually pure sugar there. However, most sugar beets contain around 18% sucrose, and getting it is as simple as boiling the beet to extract the syrup.
There's some debate over who was the first to discover this and cultivate sugar beets for that purpose. What's certain is that during the Napoleonic Wars of the mid-1800s, Britain blocked Europe's access to the West Indies, which meant they couldn't import sugar cane. Enterprising Europeans began using sugar beets instead, and factories sprang up as the demand increased. Sugar beet factories were established in the United States not long after.
The sugar found in sugar beets is the same as that found in sugar cane, and it takes a lot more work to harvest a sugar beet (as you know if you've read Beta Vulgaris). Yet, there are some good reasons to cultivate sugar beets, especially for farmers. They grow in temperate or even cold areas where sugar cane wouldn't. Furthermore, growing crops that contain sugar is much more lucrative than growing crops that don't: in Minnesota, for instance, farmers of sugar beets net over seven times the income of those who work with non-sugar crops! In 2023, the United States produced around 35 million tons of sugar beets. In addition to sugar, the crop is used for animal feed, and can be converted into ethanol. Sugar beets that are deemed "not food grade," sometimes known as "energy beets," are turned into fuel via fermentation. While corn is still the primary source of food-based ethanol, beets show a lot of promise because their natural sugar helps with the fermentation process.
Sugar beets aren't typically a direct-to-consumer product for food or other purposes. They do contain fiber and other minerals, but their high sugar content limits their nutritional prowess. The sugar that cane and beets provide is structurally identical, seeing as both have been refined. There is one major aesthetic and ethical difference, though. As it's sold in stores, cane sugar is pure white in color, something usually achieved by processing it with bone char (a bone-based charcoal that removes impurities), whereas beet sugar is not. Some vegans exclusively use beet sugar for this reason.
Even if you don't decide to head up to Minnesota to work the beet piler (look at a picture of that thing!), it's good to know a little more about sugar beets. At the very least, I hear they come in handy during Napoleonic wars.
Illustration of beta vulgaris from Atlas des plantes de France (1891) by Amédée Masclef, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Filed under Nature and the Environment
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