Your rating:
Selected as an Evening Standard 'one to watch in 2023' It's the early 1990s, and in the Irish village of Crossmore, Lucy feels out of place. Despite her fierce friendships, she's always felt this way, and the conventional path of marriage and motherhood doesn't appeal to her at all. Not even with handsome and doting Martin, her closest childhood friend. Lucy begins to make sense of herself during a long hot summer, when a spark with her school friend Susannah escalates to an all-consuming infatuation, and, very quickly, to a desperate and devastating love. Fearful of rejection from her small and conservative community, Lucy begins living a double life, hiding the most honest parts of herself in stolen moments with Susannah. But with the end of school and the opportunity to leave Crossmore looming, Lucy must choose between two places, two people and two futures, each as terrifying as the other. But only one can offer her real happiness. Sunburn is an astute and tender portrayal of first love, adolescent anxiety and the realities of growing up in a small town where tradition holds people tightly in its grasp.
No posts yet
Kick off the convo with a theory, question, musing, or update
Your rating:
2/3 stars
There were some lovely moments of writing in this book, but I just found it not very compelling and started to meander towards the end. It could've been that I just got buy and had less time towards the end, but it felt like a bit of a chore to finish.
* We feel things very strongly, but we feel them quietly. Our deepest emotions may be manifested in the lightest of sighs, but not much else. The silence says a lot. All that upset has to go somewhere; I sometimes feel it moving under my skin, waiting to be lanced.
* All my life she has been my only role model, my greatest aspiration, but since I started to see her as a person beyond a parent, I have seen her as a grave misfortune, and now I cannot go back to the way I saw her before. Without all the mysticism of being my mother, she is just a woman, exactly like me, only with less time ahead of her, and - I’m beginning to think - all the same uncertainty. Maybe I’m just immature, maybe I could be happy too. Really, I don’t even need to be happy, I just need to be the same as everybody else.
* How can I defend myself to Mother when I don’t understand what I am defending?
* I feel as though I am nothing but a lesson for other people to learn, a necessary heartbreak before they know true happiness.
0 0
