Just Jennifer

My Sunshine Away by M.O. Walsh (February 10, 2015)

A young boy’s teenage years, in fact, most of the teenage years of a group of children in a Baton Rouge, Louisiana neighborhood, are colored by the rape of one of the girls, a rape that goes unsolved.  The fourteen-year-old narrator has been in love with Lindy Simpson, the girl from across the street with long blonde hair and long legs from bicycle riding a track, for as long as he can remember.  Lindy has never returned his love and adoration, with the exception of the year immediately following the rape, as she turns to him with a strange type of friendship.  As the narrator relates his story to an unseen listener, he relives that summer with great detail including the fact that he was considered a suspect.  The narrator is determined to solve Lindy’s rape at all costs, so much so that his sister’s death and his parents’ subsequent divorce have very little effect on him and he almost misses his teenage years because of his obsession, first with Lindy and then with the crime.  This new voice in Southern gothic fiction details the atmosphere of a sultry Louisiana summer, captures the essence of being a teenage boy in love and is able to tell the story in retrospect with a feeling of immediacy when everything is new and unknown rather than with retrospection.  A haunting and tender coming of age story, when the rape is finally solved, it is more of a “huh” moment rather than an “aha” moment.