I picked up Sunburn on a Tuesday evening, rain against the window, thinking I’d read a few chapters before bed. Four hours later I was still sitting in the same spot, the book pressed against my chest, my neck stiff from not moving. I had underlined so many passages that the margins looked like a black garden.
The question at the heart of this novel: what do you do when the person you love most is also the thing that could destroy your entire life?
The Girl Who Lives in Other People’s Eyes
Lucy is fifteen when we meet her, living in Crossmore, a small Irish town in the early 1990s. She knows what’s expected. Marry Martin, the boy next door. Have children. Stay quiet. But she also knows, with a certainty that terrifies her, that she cannot stop looking at Susannah. Her friend. The girl whose hair catches light like a flame.
The plot moves through three summers, from age fifteen to twenty. Lucy’s obsession with Susannah deepens, and eventually, miraculously, Susannah wants her back. But wanting Susannah means hiding. It means lying to Martin, who is kind and offers a safe future. It means lying to her mother, whose love Lucy already knows is conditional. It means lying to herself.
What struck me most was how Howarth shows us the mechanics of self-betrayal. Lucy doesn’t make one big terrible choice. She makes a thousand small ones. She lets her mother set a place at dinner for Martin. She lets herself be kissed by him. She tells herself it’s just for now, just until she’s ready. I have done this. I think most people who grew up hiding parts of themselves have done this. You think you can outwait your own life.
The suspense is not whether Lucy and Susannah will be discovered. It’s whether Lucy will be able to bear the weight of her own cowardice. I won’t tell you how it ends. But I will say that the ending felt true in a way that hurt.
The Religion of Wanting
Howarth’s prose is the real engine here. It is lush and overheated and sometimes excessive, and that is exactly right for a narrator who sees the world through the fever of first love.
Lucy describes Susannah in religious language constantly. “Never in all my years of Christianity has there been talk of an angel like this.” She takes Communion and cannot focus on the host because Susannah knelt beside her and the girl’s tongue was more sacred. This is not just pretty writing. It is the book’s core mechanism. Lucy was raised Catholic in a town where the Church’s authority is absolute. She has no framework for what she feels except worship and sin. So she does what any teenager would do. She makes Susannah her god.
The imagery of sun and heat runs through everything. Summer is when love is possible. Summer is when Lucy can pretend the cold judgment of Crossmore doesn’t exist. But sunburn is also damage. Too much exposure leaves you raw, peeling, in pain. The metaphor is not subtle but it works because Howarth commits to it fully. You can feel the heat coming off the pages.
There is a scene where Lucy watches Susannah eat an apple. It should be nothing. It becomes everything. That is the book’s gift. It takes ordinary moments and makes them thrum with longing.
The Love You Can’t Outwait
Here is what Sunburn understands that other coming-out stories sometimes miss. The strongest cage is not hatred. It is warm, golden affection that you will lose if you tell the truth.
Lucy’s mother never hits her. She just stops setting a plate at dinner. She just stops speaking to her. The neglect is quiet, slow, and absolutely devastating. Lucy starves, literally and emotionally, and still she cannot stop wanting her mother’s love. “Even at my small age, I understood that there were limits to love, and I felt sure that one day people would run out of love for me.”
This book will not give you a triumphant ending where everyone learns and grows and accepts. It will not give you easy villains. Lucy’s mother is not a monster. She is a product of her time and place, and that is somehow worse. Because how do you fight something that doesn’t see itself as cruel?
I think this book is for people who have loved someone they had to hide. It is for people who have chosen safety over truth and then had to live with the choice. It is not for anyone who wants a simple happy ending or a clear moral.
What you take away: that sometimes the bravest thing is not the loudest thing. That love can feel like the sun and still burn you. That you can carve your initials into trees and still have to leave the forest.
This book won’t solve anything for you. But it will make you feel slightly less alone in the moments when you’re choosing yourself over the people who raised you.
Core insight: the hardest person to leave is not the one who hurts you. It is the one who loves you, just not enough to let you be real.
