Sunburn

“Now is the time between birth and slaughter. Another Summer has arrived.”
Summer has come to Crossmore, and Lucy is waiting for some anything to happen. She’s waiting to love her best friend, Martin, the way she’s supposed to. Waiting, for her friend Susannah to notice her the way she burns to be. Sunburn is the fragile-volatile-inertia of young queer love coming of age in rural Ireland. Chloe Michelle Howarth’s prose is enthralling, the village of Crossmore feels like the edge of the world—suffocating and inescapable under the weight of its expectation and tradition. Lucy’s crisis of self is so well explored it was, at times, as difficult to keep reading as it was to put down. Sunburn is an agonizing debut, and the best book I read last summer.