Thanks to Netgalley for this book. Sorry it took me awhile to get to it. I “lost” it on my Kindle and just found it!

Because I requested this book so long ago, I have no idea what made me select it in the first place. And honestly, when I started reading, I didn’t read the blurb, so I didn’t know what it was about at all. What I discovered was a beautiful little gem of a coming of age story.

From Goodreads:

It was the summer everything changed…

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 Simpson—free spirit, track star, and belle of the block—experiences 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.

The book starts (no spoiler because it’s truly the beginning of the book) with a neighborhood girl being raped near her house. The fallout of the crime is profound on everyone on the street. The unnamed narrator is in love with this girl. He has been for years. But as he begins to understand what happened to the girl his view of her changes as she evolves, trying to deal with the trauma.

The prose of this book is gorgeous. There are sections about the city of Baton Rouge with no tie to the plot. So, not only is it a story of this one street, it’s also a love letter to the author’s hometown. My guess is that I selected this book thinking it was some kind of thriller. It’s not at all, but what I discovered was even better. I really loved this book.

Most of the characters in this book are teenagers, characters I can relate to as I am raising two of my own right now. While the crime against Lindy Simpson is the main story, I felt a connection to the younger boy who is obsessed with Lindy. There is no name ever given to the young boy, yet I felt like I knew him. He was truly obsessed with Lindy. He knew her schedule, what she wore, how she sat, and who did the unthinkable to her. It was frightening and eye opening at how such innocence can turn into something so dangerous without anyone giving it a second thought.

I enjoyed how the story was told from a male point of view. This is rare in the books I usually read. The setting of Baton Rouge, Louisiana was interesting and eye opening when it was described how the city flooded, how the people forced to leave New Orleans invaded it, and how the children were left to play outside and entertain themselves. I could picture the streets, with the lights on the porches, and the kids playing in the front yard with their bikes. The flooding made me smile, with the idea of a neighbor driving his boat from house to house to check on his neighbors and give them food.

The words in this book are from childhood memories. They are shared as a child would share them and in the way a child would perceive what was happening. There was some jumping between timeframes, but it flowed with the story perfectly. I enjoyed that the memories were not taken from a child view and turned into an adult view. The innocence and fun of childhood was shown as was how tough circumstance sometimes appear different to a child than to an adult in the same place.


This is a must read for 2015.

Good whodunit, but a bit heavy on teenage angst. The ending was fairly realistic, but somehow less than satisfying.