Sunburn is set in the early 1990s in a small village in Ireland. Our narrator is Lucy, a teenage girl at the cusp of adulthood. She lives with her parents, her brothers, and her granny on their farm. It’s a similar life to almost all of her peers. She spends time with her girls, her closest friends at school. Her best friend is Martin, the boy on the next farm over who she has grown up with, who might now be in love with her. Her future, if she accepts Martin’s love, is laid out, not vastly different from the life her own mother lives now.
But Lucy doesn’t feel for Martin, or any of the other boys, what it seems the other girls feel. Instead, she finds herself fixated on Susannah O’Shea. Susannah is different from the other girls – wealthier, but less stable. Her father left years before and she lives alone with her mother in their large, impressive home but increasingly Susannah is left to her own devices. As Lucy and Susannah spend more and more time together, Lucy’s future begins to diverge in two very different directions.
This is a coming of age story and as a depiction of female adolescence, I think it gets a lot of things right. The uncertainty, the fear. Both the close friendships of teenage girls and the barbed edges of them. I think there are also some stifling aspects of being a teenager in a small town that it seems to get very right.
Where the story faltered for me was simply that too much time was spent dwelling in the uncertainty and there wasn’t enough pushing the story forward. There is tension in the growing secrets of Susannah and Lucy’s relationship and Lucy’s double life. It’s probably realistic how much time Lucy spends waffling between her choices but it isn’t all that interesting to keep reading about. By the time we got to the end of the story, I didn’t like Lucy anymore and I kind of wished she would leave both Susannah and Martin alone and let them get on with their lives.
Karissa Reads Books 