Sunburn, Chloe Michelle Howarth
‘A sapphic coming-of-age story, Sunburn details the clammy palms and racing hearts of first love, the pressures to slip into the shadows and follow the crowd, and the traditions that block the sun and extinguish the light.’
Sunburn begins in the sticky summer of 1989 in a small Irish village called Crossmore. What follows is the sexual awakening of two adolescent girls, Lucy and Susannah, which escalates into a heady, burning infatuation for one another that veers dangerously away from the expectations of the time and Lucy’s strict Catholic upbringing.
Catching alight through the form of yearning letters, Chloe Michelle Howarth achieves something both symphonic in style and claustrophobic in temperament in her gloriously queer debut. Through Lucy’s lovesick lens, Sunburn proves tender yet potent. Equal amounts teenage desire and melodrama, a childish adolescence simmers authentically throughout, managing to capture a beautiful kind of juxtaposition between the stubbornness of a feeling and the conviction in which both girls live and breathe for one another. In turn, alongside the commentary on stigma, sexuality, and religion, Sunburn also seems to glean some kind of retribution for the validity and honesty of the teenage heart.
This makes it entirely devastating when Lucy must wrestle with her presumed sin, experiencing the weight of the societal expectations of her small Irish community and its deeply set views, the looming influence of her own mother, and constant and kind presence of her childhood friends. Reminiscent of the all-encompassing narrative voice of Megan Nolan’s Acts of Desperation, Howarth’s Sunburn holds something akin to that acute tunnel vision. Lucy’s perspective is almost entirely led by the crack and spit of her emotions, with only a smattering of dialogue here and there, living almost entirely in the furnace of her mind and heart.
A sapphic coming-of-age story, Sunburn details the clammy palms and racing hearts of first love, the pressures to slip into the shadows and follow the crowd, and the traditions that block the sun and extinguish the light.
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