Review: My Sunshine Away by M.O. Walsh

• Format: Kindle Edition
• File Size: 1177 KB
• Print Length: 308 pages
• Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0399169520
• Publisher: Putnam Adult (Feb. 10 2015)
• Sold by: Penguin Group USA
• Language: English
• ASIN: B00L9B85G0

Book Description

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.

Praise for My Sunshine Away

“Excellent… Walsh has an innate knack for plot and suspense, but the real pleasure here is his prose. This stunning and gracefully written debut novel is a total page-turner until the very end.” —Entertainment Weekly

“Just 14 pages into reading My Sunshine Away, M.O. Walsh’s debut novel about a boy growing up in Baton Rouge, La., I had a thought that I scribbled in the margin: ‘So To Kill.’ The narrator, after all, was a bit like Harper Lee’s Scout, a person now all grown up and looking back at childhood. And both books begin with the memory of a tragic moment. To Kill a Mockingbird, of course, starts with Scout’s brother’s badly broken elbow. Walsh’s book begins with the rape of a teenage girl next door. There are some striking similarities to the stories…. My Sunshine Away is also simply, like Lee’s novel, a great work of fiction. It’s a page-turning thriller with a heartbreaking crime and an intriguing cast of suspects. But it’s also a love story to Louisiana, with passages that force the reader to pause and contemplate the ‘wrong-ended telescoping’ that gives the state a bad reputation…. It’s a book about love and forgiveness and family and hope….Turning the pages with be a necessary treat.… [Walsh’s] haunting, lyrical novel will compel you to look back on your own life’s mysteries, your own childhood fog.”—The Fort Worth Star Telegram         


“Try and restrain yourself from flying through the pages of this wonderful novel. Instead savor this lush Louisiana mystery that takes you back to what life tasted like when you were still somewhat naïve to the ways of the world. Not just Southern, but American in its vivid Baton Rouge colors and scents, treetops and grasses, My Sunshine Away is the story of how the events of our youth profoundly affect us as adults. The last page is as satisfying as the first. A mystery you cannot wait to solve.” —Kathryn Stockett, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Help

"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.... Celebrate, fiction lovers: The gods of Southern gothic storytelling have inducted a junior member." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“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.” —Booklist (starred review)
 
“I really loved this book. I am in awe, swept up in the quiet beauty of the prose, and in the wisdom and compassion of the narrator. I can't praise it enough. My Sunshine Away is not a thriller; it is not genre fiction; but it's realism at its finest, and it is a page turner—a story made memorable in paragraph after paragraph by the brilliance of its author, and by the scope of the questions he asks as to how we live this life to the fullest as loving and moral beings. It’s about love, obsession, and pain. Such a beautiful book. Such a remarkable book. I can't praise it enough.” —Anne Rice, #1 nationally bestselling author of Prince Lestat 

“My Sunshine Away is that rarest find, a page-turner you want to read slowly and a literary novel you can’t look away from. At times funny, at times spine-tinglingly suspenseful, and at times just flat-out wise, this novel is also a meditation on memory, how it can destroy or damn us but redeem us as well. It’s a book to read and reread, one that will only get better with time, like its writer. I’m already excited about M. O. Walsh’s next book, whatever it is.” —Tom Franklin, bestselling author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“In his stunning first novel, Baton Rouge native M.O. Walsh evokes a languid Southern Gothic atmosphere, rife with a hazy, heat-drenched poetry…. Reminiscent of Pat Conroy’s sweeping family epics and Jeffrey Eugenides’ folkloric intrigue…My Sunshine Away achieves a rare feat: both a page-turning mystery and literary-quality novel, you’ll be charmed, impressed, and engrossed in this meditation on memory’s ambiguity, and how a childhood tragedy can affect us more deeply than we consciously know.” —Bustle

"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.... 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." —Library Journal

“From beginning to end, My Sunshine Away is full of wisdom, wit, and wonder.” —Bookpage

“Tenderly nostalgic…and thoroughly immersive.” —Publishers Weekly

“This is literature of the highest order. Although the book snaps with the tautness of a thriller––and Walsh keeps the reader guessing until the end, as the best mystery writers do––My Sunshine Away also asks essential questions, like how much responsibility we have to each other, and whether we can we ever fully reassemble the pieces of broken lives. And while Walsh hints at answers, it’s his willingness to engage such ideas that makes My Sunshine Away an important work of fiction. We need more novelists with the guts and clarity of M. O. Walsh.” ––Matthew Thomas, New York Times–bestselling author of We Are Not Ourselves

“If you start this novel, you will not put it down. My Sunshine Away is a riveting, suspenseful, page-turning mystery. It is also a wise, insightful, and beautifully written novel. This is an extraordinary debut.” ––Jill McCorkle, New York Times–bestselling author of Life After Life

“M.O. Walsh has written one of the best books I've read in a long while. An outstanding examination of the way that the past and the weight of our memories shape us, My Sunshine Away, thanks to Walsh’s verve and total control over the narrative, feels utterly original.” —Kevin Wilson, author of The Family Fang

“Q: When is it a thrill to feel gutted? A: When you start reading the book you hold in your hands. M. O. Walsh’s My Sunshine Away reminds us that art can be wrenching and a delight, that pain—if examined through wit, intimacy, and wisdom—can be a salve. This novel is great.”––Darin Strauss, internationally bestselling author of Half a Life and Chang and Eng

“My Sunshine Away begins with a crime. But the novel is so much more than a mystery; it’s half lament, half love letter to youth and to possibility. On every page, we feel complicit, perhaps even guilty. Guilty of what? For ever having been young ourselves. The magic of My Sunshine Away is in M. O. Walsh’s extraordinary ability to make us long for the heartache of youth and its inevitable sins. This is an awe-inspiring debut.” —Hannah Pittard, author of Reunion and The Fates Will Find Their Way 

“If I were asked to list the qualities the ideal novel would offer, I’d start by demanding beautiful sentences. I’d want the opening to grab me and I’d want the ending to refuse to let go. I’d ask for characters who consistently surprise by being somehow deeper and less predictable than we could ever have guessed they’d be. I’d want Place to be written with a capital P. I’d want a mystery at the heart of the story, and a mystery or two in every heart. And when I finished reading the book, I’d want to be both wiser and sadder than when I started. M. O. Walsh’s magnificent novel My Sunshine Away afforded me all these pleasures and more. This is one of the best novels I’ve read in ages.” —Steve Yarbrough, author of The Realm of Last Chances



About the Author

M.O. Walsh’s fiction and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Oxford American, The Southern Review, 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.

My Review


What a pleasure to read a well-written and compelling story. My Sunshine Away is a brilliant coming-of-age story. It is story about memories. And about ghosts. The ghosts that haunt us all.

According to My Sunshine Away, we all are trailed by ghosts. Memories...ghosts...whatever you want to call them....they are brought alive in a "perfect" suburban neighbourhood in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. As we follow the story set in 1989, we are asked many questions by our narrator who is now grown. What would we have done? What would we have remembered.

My Sunshine Away is a novel that I will remember for a long time.  It made me ponder and think about things that have happened in my past. Have I let go? What still haunts me. Fascinating book. It is a thriller and at the same time it is not. It is definitely a book worth reading.