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Summary
Summary
The debut novel everyone is talking about... ÂThe last page is as satisfying as the first." ÂKathryn Stockett ÂI really loved this book... I can't praise it enough."ÂAnne Rice ÂIt's a book to read and reread, one that will only get better with time."ÂTom Franklin It was the summer everything changed.Â
My Sunshine Away unfolds in a Baton Rouge neighborhood best known for cookouts on sweltering summer afternoons, cauldrons of spicy crawfish, and passionate football fandom. But in the summer of 1989, when fifteen-year-old Lindy SimpsonÂfree spirit, track star, and belle of the blockÂexperiences a horrible crime late one evening near her home, it becomes apparent that this idyllic stretch of Southern suburbia has a dark side, too.
In My Sunshine Away , M.O. Walsh brilliantly juxtaposes the enchantment of a charmed childhood with the gripping story of a violent crime, unraveling families, and consuming adolescent love. Acutely wise and deeply honest, it is an astonishing and page-turning debut about the meaning of family, the power of memory, and our ability to forgive.
Author Notes
M. O. Walsh was born and raised in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and is a graduate of The University of Mississippi M.F.A. Program. He is currently the Director of the Creative Writing Workshop at The University of New Orleans.
His stories and essays have appeared in publications such as The New York Times, The Southern Review, American Short Fiction and Epoch. His short stories have also been anthologized in Best New American Voices, Bar Stories, Best of the Net and Louisiana in Words.
My Sunshine Away is his debut novel. His collection of short stories, entitled The Prospect of Magic, was published in 2010.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In Walsh's debut, a horrible crime shatters a community in 1989 Baton Rouge, La., when teenager Lindy Simpson is raped and her attacker is never caught. The nameless narrator of this tale is an adolescent boy with a crush on Lindy. The narrator's love for Lindy manifests in a desperate desire to connect with her under any circumstances, causing him to be suspected of her assault. This need to connect grows stronger after his sister dies in a freak accident and that draws him and Lindy closer together. Everything comes to a head when he tries to play the hero and expose the man he thinks was her rapist on their street. Walsh's novel is both tenderly nostalgic and a window into a unique and specific corner of America. The narration moves seamlessly between the adult narrator's thoughts and his memories as a teenager. Despite the dark subject matter, this book is often charming, and thoroughly immersive. Agent: Renee Zuckerbrot, the Renee Zuckerbrot Literary Agency. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Thought to be perfectly safe, suburban Baton Rouge in the late 1980s nevertheless had a vibe that was more Ozzy Osbourne than Ozzie Nelson. Still, the rape of 15-year-old Lindy Simpson just yards from her own home had repercussions throughout idyllic Woodland Hills, and the events of that summer and their remaining high-school years are narrated by the 14-year-old boy who worshiped Lindy from his bedroom window across the street. Himself one of four suspects, the narrator in Walsh's debut novel is driven by a misguided desire to solve the crime, deliver Lindy unscathed back in time, and win her heart. Only slightly deterred by the death of his sister and divorce of his parents, he eventually uncovers the truth but at a cost that virtually destroys everyone else in the process. Subtly malevolent in exposing the ways innocence can be corrupted, Walsh's distinctive exploration of teenage self-absorption and self-recrimination is told from the vantage point of the narrator as an adult who understands that teens are armed with most of the tools but little of the knowledge needed to take on the world. Suspenseful, compassionate, and absorbing, Walsh's word-perfect rendering of the doubts, insecurities, bravado, and idealism of teens deserves to be placed in the hands of readers of Tom Franklin, Hannah Pittard, and Jeffrey Eugenides.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2014 Booklist
Guardian Review
A dark story of teenage obsession, guilt and lost innocence in sleepy Louisiana Walsh's debut, written from the perspective of a narrator in his 30s remembering his suburban upbringing, reads at once like a homage to and an apology for the mediocrity of his hometown: "When compared to the national averages, Baton Rouge normally ranks around 37th in the top 100 metropolitan areas of America, no matter what you're measuring. However, we always score well in odd polls. We're off the chart in mysterious categories like 'enjoys their neighbours', 'had a good weekend' and 'hopes their children will stay close'." The event that destroys this sleepy idyll occurs on a sweltering summer evening in 1989 when a popular 14-year-old named Lindy Simpson is thrown from her bicycle and raped only yards from her home. No one witnesses the attack and the perpetrator is never brought to justice. But suspicion falls on everyone; not least the nameless narrator, who has been spying on Lindy Simpson since he was 11 years old. He can even provide the precise date on which the obsession started: "The day I fell in love with Lindy Simpson was January 28, 1986. This was also the day that the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded." His feelings are awakened by the stream of pink vomit Lindy produces as their class witnesses the disaster unfold on television. Walsh's book, which was seven years in the writing, is an exercise in southern gothic that includes a pair of genuine southern goths. The narrator shaves the sides of his head in sympathy with Lindy's obsession with "a band called Bauhaus... She became thin and, most said, bulimic. Rows of small pimples appeared on her chest. This was a hard thing to watch." It's a strange coincidence that the UK publication should emerge at the same time as Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman. Both are memory novels containing recollections of a rape. Both are based on first-hand observation of an insular, southern society steeped in heat and paranoia. There is even a significant episode involving the shooting of a stray dog. But whereas critics are divided over whether Scout makes a successful adult, Walsh seems entirely secure with his narrator's attempts to justify the actions of his teenage self. The tone is supplicatory and insistent ("hear me out", "I don't want to lose you in this confession", "let me explain"); yet the implied sense of intimacy becomes deeply unsettling: "You must live in Louisiana to understand this. You must hide in our azaleas to tell this." The most striking passages arise less from the narrator's fixation with Lindy in particular than his feelings for Louisiana in general; not least the city's profound inferiority complex. "When people think of Louisiana they think exclusively of New Orleans. We are OK with that... The people of New Orleans have been known to wonder what a generic place like Baton Rouge, at its core, has to offer. For a long time, we had a hard time coming up with an answer. But now I can tell you. We have guilt." The passage introduces a digression on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, in which the population of Baton Rouge swelled by 200,000 as it struggled to accommodate the influx of refugees. Such rumination runs the risk of forfeiting the suspense, but it amplifies the book's themes of lost innocence, the end of childhood and the painful discovery that "the world, after all, is not as simple as football games on fall Saturdays, a bunch of friendly people being friendly". On this evidence, Walsh's Baton Rouge is a highly nuanced nowheresville that could match Anne Tyler's Baltimore. Watch this generally overlooked space. * To order My Sunshine Away for [pound]10.39 (RRP [pound]12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over [pound]10, online orders only. - Alfred Hickling.
Kirkus Review
The 1989 rape of a 15-year-old golden girl profoundly alters her suburban Baton Rouge neighborhood and all those who love her."I imagine that many children in South Louisiana have stories similar to this one, and when they grow up, they move out into the world and tell them," says the narrator of Walsh's debut novel, looking back on the floods, fires, mosquitoes, heat waves and psychopaths of his childhood. Probably sobut only a few can do it with the beauty, terror and wisdom found in these addictive pages. When Lindy Simpson's childhood is abruptly ended one evening as she bikes home from track practice, so much goes with it, including the innocence of the 14-year-old boy who loves her to the point of obsessionand eventually becomes a suspect in the crime himself. He fills in the events of the next few years in a style that recalls the best of Pat Conroy: the rich Southern atmosphere, the interplay of darkness and light in adolescence, the combination of brisk narrative suspense with philosophical musings on memory, manhood and truth. All the supporting characters, from the neighborhood kids and parents to walk-ons like the narrator's cool uncle Barry and a guy we meet in the penultimate chapter at the LSU/Florida Gators game in 2007, are both particular and real. So is the ambience of late '80s and early '90s America, from the explosion of the Challenger to the Jeffrey Dahmer nightmare. In fact, one of the very few missteps is a weirdly dropped-in disquisition on Hurricane Katrina. That's easy to forgive, though, as you suck down the story like a cold beer on a hot Louisiana afternoon. Celebrate, fiction lovers: The gods of Southern gothic storytelling have inducted a junior member. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
The kids of Piney Creek Road in Baton Rouge, LA, live simply and happily, dreaming about school dances and racing one another on their street. But one evening in the summer of 1989, a terrible crime takes place. The event reverberates in the community for years to come, especially for one 14-year-old boy who was forever changed by what happened. This debut novel from the author of the award-winning short story collection The Prospect of Magic is much more than a simple coming-of-age story; it is a rumination on how events in one's life can appear differently depending on where and when they are experienced and recalled. VERDICT As a Baton Rouge native, Walsh gives the reader an intimate understanding of the place as if it were a beloved but misunderstood grandmother. Rarely does a new author display the skill to develop a page-turner with such a literary tone. Readers of both popular and literary fiction will get their fixes from this novel. [See Prepub Alert, 8/4/14.] Shannon Greene, Greenville Technical Coll. Lib., SC (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
***This excerpt is from an uncorrected proof*** Copyright © 2015 M.O. Walsh You are my sunshine My only sunshine. You make me happy When skies are gray. You'll never know, dear, How much I love you. Please don't take my sunshine away. -- Jimmie Davis, Governor of Louisiana (1944-1948 and 1960-1964) 1. There were four suspects in the rape of Lindy Simpson, a crime that occurred directly on top of the sidewalk of Piney Creek Road, the same sidewalk our parents had once hopefully carved their initials into, years before, as residents of the first street in the Woodland Hills subdivision to have houses on each lot. It was a crime impossible during the daylight, when we neighborhood kids would have been tearing around in go-karts, coloring chalk figures on our driveways, or chasing snakes down into storm gutters. But, at night, the streets of Woodland Hills sat empty and quiet, except for the pleasure of frogs greeting the mosquitoes that rose in squadrons from the swamps behind our properties. On this particular evening, however, in the dark turn beneath the first busted streetlight in the history of Piney Creek Road, a man, or perhaps a boy, stood holding a long piece of rope. He tied one end of this rope to the broken light pole next to the street and wrapped the other around his own hand. Thinking himself unseen, he then crawled into the azalea bushes beside Old Man Casemore's house, the rope lagging in shadow behind him like a tail, where he perhaps practiced, once or twice, pulling the rope taut and high across the sidewalk. And then this man, or this boy, knowing the routine of the Simpson girl, waited to hear the rattle of her banana-seated Schwinn coming around the curve. You should know: Baton Rouge, Louisiana, is a hot place. Even the fall of night offers no comfort. There are no breezes sweeping off the dark servitudes and marshes, no cooling rains. Instead, the rain that falls here survives only to boil on the pavement, to steam up your glasses, to burden you. So this man, or this boy, was undoubtedly sweating as he crouched in the bushes, undoubtedly eaten alive by insects. They gnash you here. They cover you. And so it is not a mistake to wonder if he might have been dissuaded from this violence had he lived in a more merciful place. It is important, I believe, when you think back about a man or a boy in the bushes, to wonder if maybe one soothing breeze would have calmed him, would have softened his mood, would have changed his mind. But it did not. So the act took place in darkness, in near silence, in heat, and Lindy Simpson remembered little other than the sudden appearance of a rope in front of her bicycle, the sharp pull of its braid across her chest. Months later, and after much therapy, she would also recall how the bicycle rode on without her after she fell. She would remember how she never even saw it tip over before a sock was stuffed into her mouth and her face was pushed into the lawn. The crush of weight on her back. The scrape of asphalt against her knees. She would remember these, too. Then a voice in her ear that she did not recognize. Then a blow to the back of her head. She was fifteen years old. This was the summer of 1989 and no arrests were made. Don't believe what you see on the crime shows today. No single hairs were tweezed out of Old Man Casemore's lawn. No length of rope was sent off to a lab. No DNA was salvaged off the pebbles of our concrete. And although the people of Woodland Hills answered earnestly every question the police initially asked of them, although they tried their best to be helpful, there was no immediate evidence to speak of. All four of these primary suspects therefore remained unofficial and uncharged, as the rape had occurred so quickly and without apparent witness that the crime scene itself began to fade the moment Lindy Simpson regained consciousness and pushed her bicycle back home that night, a place only four doors away, to lay it down in its usual spot. It faded even further as she walked through the back door of her house and climbed upstairs to her bathroom, where she showered in water of an unknown temperature. There are times in my life when I imagine this water scalding. Other times, frozen. Regardless, Lindy never came down for dinner. She was likely thought by her parents to be yapping with friends on the telephone, twirling the cord around her young fingers, until her mother, a woman named Peggy, made her evening rounds with the laundry basket. It was then she saw a pair of underpants in the bathroom, dotted with bright red blood, lying next to a single running shoe. The other shoe, a blue Reebok, was missing. By this time, her daughter Lindy was curled in her bed and concussed. A bed that just that morning had been a child's. I should tell you now that I was one of the suspects. Hear me out. Let me explain. 2. One and a half miles from the Woodland Hills subdivision sat the Perkins School, grades 4-12. It was a private and well-funded place. Great white columns stood in front of the main school building, and the rolling lawn was shaded by oaks. Brick walkways scrolled throughout the open quadrangle, each embedded with copper plaques to memorialize past accolades. It was a prideful place, and deservedly. Behind the main campus, adjacent to the parking lot, was the football field and track that Lindy Simpson traveled to at precisely five o'clock every summer evening, where she would train with friends as the sun went down--stretching, jogging, sprinting, laughing--until returning home for supper in the growing darkness of half past eight. So, at roughly four fifty-five each summer afternoon of the late 1980s, I'd lie on my stomach in the family room of my home and watch from beneath the blinds of our floor-to-ceiling windows as Lindy's piano lesson ended and mine got set to begin. Across the street and two doors down from me, the dowdy figure of Mrs. Morrison would appear first from the Simpson house. She was a teacher at the Perkins School, my school, who taught private lessons during the summer, a lady so polite it is hard to imagine her even having a cameo in a story that begins this way. She wore bright floral blouses with shoulder pads. She carried folders crammed with photocopied scales and sheet music. She often wore hats. She is the innocent stuff in the background of time. Pin her up in the sky of this place. And though I often complained to my neighborhood friends that I hated these lessons, that I hated her, this was a lie. Before Mrs. Morrison could reach the sidewalk at four fifty-nine, Lindy Simpson would hustle up the driveway with the bike at her hip. Children, and we were all children then, never wore helmets in those days. So, Lindy would stop at the edge of the lawn to pull back her hair. She would knot a loose ponytail, tuck a few wayward strands behind her ears, and be off. Due to the bend in our street, and the fact that my house sat right on the corner, right in the crook of the elbow, I could watch Lindy Simpson pedal toward me beneath the blinds. And then, after coming up with a host of scenarios in which she might dismount from her bike and trek more permanently into my life, I'd watch her pedal away. Each day at five. This ritual was my pleasure. She wore tank tops and thin cotton shorts, and she was a track star. In one of many such memories about Lindy, I can recall a race at my school conjured up by your typical eighth-grade boys during lunch hour. We all wore uniforms at Perkins, white oxford shirts and blue slacks, and the boys who wanted to race were often those who pulled up the collars on their shirts, rolled their pants legs in a fashionable way. These were boys who already had girlfriends, boys who played in summer sports leagues and had straight blond hair. Our school was small and, for this reason alone, I often found myself among them, pencil-thin and curly-headed. The goal on this day was to get to the central oak tree, standing some fifty yards away in the common area. The unspoken prize was a half hour of glory, maybe the bud of some reputation, and this was everything. Kids tightened up their laces and stretched out their hamstrings. I remember taking a pair of pens out of my pocket and setting them in the grass while, behind us, Lindy Simpson stepped out of the red-brick library. She was fifteen, like I've said, one year older than me, and therefore in high school. This was in the school year before it all happened, before we all knew, so I was undoubtedly not alone in wondering about every inch of her. She wore the same plaid jumper that all the high school girls wore, baring their golden collarbones and slender calves, but Lindy wore it with her blue Reebok running shoes while the other girls donned sandals and Keds. Yet she was no goddess. There were other girls whose names were more hotly bandied, other more beautiful girls my friends and I evoked in the dark. But as Lindy was a female, and as she was older, and as the small of her hairless ankles peeked above her white cotton socks, she held dominion over us all on the playground. "I want in," she told us, and so I picked up my pens off the grass. I would never race Lindy. I had seen her run my entire life, outpacing even the older boys in my neighborhood, and this was a privilege not shared by the other dolts on the lawn. I watched them take off toward the tree, the lot of them, and the sight of Lindy's jumper flitting around her legs as she ran, the flash of the pink boxer shorts she wore beneath it, the flex of her thighs, it still comes to me in dreams, the youthful vision of it, in surprise moments alone in my car. And although Lindy was never a tomboy, not thick-waisted or dusty like they often are, she used to romp through the woods with us behind our neighborhood. She played football with us in the street. She was fast. She was nimble. We didn't know if she was tough because she never got caught. So when she beat my schoolmates to the tree that day and placed her ringless fingers on top of her head to tease them, I looked around the playground for someone to say, "I told you so" to, to prove that Lindy and I were connected in some small way, but I was the only one who hadn't run after her. I then watched Lindy wave at me from the tree, as if we were back on Piney Creek Road, and jog toward the high school building. I don't remember waving back. I only remember staring at the building she entered, the high school building, and feeling one year away from some brand of paradise. I tell you all this because I was not there yet, not in high school, when I used to lie on the living room floor and watch her pedal. I was young, just a boy, and yet I didn't mind Mrs. Morrison waddling up my driveway at five o'clock each summer afternoon. I was ready to play scales if she wanted me to, to smell the coffee on her breath, to feel her cold hands on top of mine. I was prepared to follow instruction for hours if need be. What did it matter? When Lindy rode by, my thoughts scuttled after her. I was mindless to all else in my crush. With Mrs. Morrison, I was only fingers. So it is true that I thought of possessing Lindy Simpson as furiously and as constantly as any fourteen-year-old boy could that hot summer of 1989. The summer of her rape. It is true that I cast us no separate futures. I opened the door for Mrs. Morrison. "Look at you," she said. "Every day. The front of your shirt is so wrinkled." Excerpted from My Sunshine Away by M. O. Walsh All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.