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A Novel
by Margie Sarsfield
Book Reviewed by: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...
BookBrowsers ask Margie Sarsfield
I'm just really grateful to every reader who has picked up Beta Vulgaris and the opportunity to talk about my creative process here! Thanks for the thoughtful questions and for the invitation!
-Margie_S
What are you reading this week? (7/2/2025)
...ype - it has three starred reviews. In audiobook format, I'm finishing up https://www.bookbrowse.com/reviews/index.cfm/book_number/4953/beta-vulgaris Beta Vulgaris by Margie Sarsfield, then on to https://www.bookbrowse.com/reviews/index.cfm/book_number/4946/mona-acts-out Mona Acts Out by Mischa Berlinski. Both authors will be here...
-kim.kovacs
What are you reading this week? (6/26/025)
...-name The Cafe with No Name by Robert Seethaler, and then I'll move on to https://www.bookbrowse.com/reviews/index.cfm/book_number/4953/beta-vulgaris Beta Vulgaris by Margie Sarsfield.
-kim.kovacs
What are you reading this week? (6/19/025)
.... I think Isola is her first work of historical fiction and I'm curious about how she got there. (And she'll be here next week.) After that, probably Beta Vulgaris by Margie Sarsfield.
-kim.kovacs
What are you reading this week? (6/12/2025)
...did. I liked the novel we read as a group - The River Knows Your Name - but I think this one is stronger and I'm enjoying it more. After that, maybe Beta Vulgaris by Margie Sarsfield (another upcoming author). Speaking of books I picked up for Q & A prep, last week I also listened to Sam by Allegra Goodman. So different from Isola...
-kim.kovacs
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. 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...continued
Full Review
(711 words)
(Reviewed by Erin Lyndal Martin).
Danya Kukafka, author of Notes on an Execution
Uncanny and electric and quietly harrowing... . Margie Sarsfield dazzles us and challenges us, delivering a novel so vivid and memorable, I'll be thinking of beet pilers for years to come. Kathryn Harlan, author of Fruiting Bodies
Sharp and atmospheric eco-horror that slices into the gruesome strangeness of industrialized agriculture. With Maggie Sarsfield's compelling cast and heady, urgent prose, Beta Vulgaris is a fever dream hungry to consume you. 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,...
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