My Sunshine Away - Softcover

Walsh, M.O.

  • 3.57 out of 5 stars
    18,707 ratings by Goodreads
 
9780241004067: My Sunshine Away

Synopsis

"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.

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Review

The Amazon Debut Spotlight Selection for February 2015: After only 50 pages My Sunshine Away gave me the same feeling as other Southern novels that have long remained favorites; The Help and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, to name two. How much of our future self is shaped by our first love, our early mistakes, and trading sweet innocence for the acrid recognition of cruelty? A lot, we discover, as we ride shotgun with a narrator who was fourteen the year that a crime against the girl he loved changed him irrevocably. This coming-of-age story set in a quiet Louisiana neighborhood touched by violence is by turns suspenseful and insightful, peppered with moments like this one that I want to commit to memory: “We were all middle-to-upper-class white kids, all the products of our parents’ success, and when we played with one another at school we played in the mirror.” –Seira Wilson

About the Author

Milton O’Neal Walsh, Jr.’s stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Epoch, and Best New American Voices, among others. He is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Mississippi and is currently the director of the Creative Writing Workshop at the University of New Orleans, where he lives and works, happily, with his wife and family.

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