By Mina Tahri
Sunburn by Chloe Michelle Howarth invites you into the sweltering world of Crossmore, an Irish Catholic town so quaint it’s almost claustrophobic. For Lucy and her tightly-knit group of friends, it comes alive in the summer, during long days spent sunbathing and long nights where the town’s pretty young things gather for the space of a few bottles. But for all its warmth and wine, this is a place where no step onto blistering grass, no flutter of sundresses across knees goes unheard, unnoticed, unscrutinized. All eyes are on Lucy as she unfolds her dangerously close friendship with Susannah, another girl from their childhood circle. And while she knows better than to stray from the path, she always seems to find herself stranded with the weeds and the wildflowers.
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“It feels as though I am an island, apart from everybody else. Perhaps we are all islands, apart from each other. Perhaps everyone else feels foreign in their hometown too. Yes, perhaps we are all just islands, as wild and merciless as each other, separated by our countless defects. Perhaps there is no remedy for it, and all we can do is learn which parts of ourselves to deny and which parts to bring into the light.”
Sunburn’s Lucy and Susannah are portraits of repressed queer adolescence, drawn side by side in loving brushstrokes. They love each other more than anything, perhaps the only thing. But of course, it’s never that simple. “She is fresh air, and warmth, and mornings in July. What is there to fix? There is evil in my yearning, know, I just can’t see where yet.” There is a clear difference in the way they cope with their shared deviant identity: Lucy obstinately clings on to the community’s approval, even as it wears thin and out, while Susannah wants nothing more than to escape the suffocation of their conservative surroundings. This tension sits at the heart of the novel: Lucy is torn between owning her love with Susannah and maintaining the fragile status quo with her family and friends, one that would be shattered if she came out. There is a clear exploration of family ties throughout the book, illustrated at its clearest through this tension. It’s not that Susannah is unconcerned with others’ opinions, but that she has already lost everything there is to lose: her father, who has long left the household, and her mother, who is gone every other weekend and pays little notice to her daughter’s life. If anything, Lucy fears that she is just another one of Susannah’s stunts to get her mother’s attention, somewhere between her obvious drinking or bringing boys to the house while she’s home. As her mother continues to be capricious and selfish, Susannah grows to be capricious and selfish. “I am afraid that we might all be our mothers’ daughters,” Lucy says, and it’s true for her, too. Years in an apathetic, duty-driven household have made her callous and self-serving.
“My own feelings are a hedge of briars that I can’t bring myself to touch. There are so many unhappy people, I just don’t want to find out that I am one of them. They walk among us, they touch you, and you become them. Introspection is like cyanide. Life is fine this way, ignorance is easy, I do what is easy. Doesn’t that make the most sense?”
Lucy’s family is undeniably humbler than Susannah’s, one of the most affluent families of the village. Susannah grew up patiently awaiting her college days, building a life elsewhere on her father’s money. Meanwhile, Lucy was quietly accustoming herself to life on her father’s farm, an escape from which would only be granted through proposal from a doting suitor. This understanding of their different backgrounds helps to contextualise Lucy’s dilemma in regards to her future. As their relationship deepens, Susannah begs Lucy to leave Crossmore with her after graduation, when they will be adults and finally free to use Susannah’s seemingly inexhaustible funds however they see fit. And while Lucy entertains a pretense of being torn, she knows deep down she could never do it. She cannot simply cast off her duty to her family in order to be with Susannah, but Susannah cannot be with Lucy if it means staying in the village they both so hate and keeping their relationship hidden. Susannah’s privilege allowed her to stay detached from Crossmore growing up, knowing that her affluence meant she could leave the moment she turned eighteen. Her family is also notably less involved with the Catholic Church, which exerts a strong influence on the entire community. But Lucy’s ties to this place cannot be forgotten as simply as Susannah paying for her plane ticket. Though she has no emotional attachment to them, this community is all she’s ever known, and she needs its familiarity to stay afloat.
“Here, every breath is heard, every evil thought is known. It might be beautiful to look at, but it is abysmal to exist in; a sweet, sad dream. And while I could think of a million places that I would rather be, I fear that I will never have the nerve to leave. I fear that Crossmore is too deep in me, and I would not know how to exist elsewhere.”
We see how deeply Lucy cares about Crossmore’s opinion of her, and the lengths to which she will go to maintain her image. She goes as far as starting an entire relationship with Martin, who she has no feelings for, to dispel suspicions that she is with Susannah. She is not just self-absorbed: she is manipulative and conniving because she needs to be accepted to survive, and that is why she leads him on. “His infatuation and my selfishness must be destroyed before they are allowed to grow any larger. I must take his beating heart, cut myself out of it, and bury it right here in the garden.” While Susannah becomes jealous and resentful, she allows it to happen: “it’s like I got rid of my self respect to make space for you.” And Susannah and Lucy are constantly making space for each other as they learn to live a life intertwined, inching towards the impossibility of simply becoming the same person. But as their differences deepen with time, this refusal to be separate becomes their quiet undoing. They stretch themselves thinner and thinner to avoid parting ways as it becomes increasingly clear that their futures are meant to be apart. After two years, the shape they built themselves around is bound to crumble once they let go. Without saying it outright, Sunburn asks: is this love, or simply fear?
“To be with her is a sin, to be without her is a tragedy.”
Sunburn was one of the first books I’ve read this academic year, and it may be rash to say so soon that it may be one of my favourites. But there was something undeniable that kept me turning the pages (and underlining, so much underlining) through the space of two late nights. Sunburn comes with a real, beating heart, a sort of emotional baggage I carried around for days after I finished. It took me five days to write this review because I simply couldn’t stop thinking about Lucy and Susannah, and what happened to them past the final page. It was easy to read, but hard to stomach. Until the very end, there is not much satisfaction in the story. There is no fairytale triumph of love over hate, only the main character’s own limitations, and so, things play out the way they would in real life (not very well). The last quarter of the book was incredibly frustrating to get through for this reason (and, perhaps, also to write?), leaving the narrative with very little resolution. Still, the lack of a neat, sugary-sweet ending fits well with the story, and any other direction the plot could have taken would probably have felt forced and illogical. Overall, it was very well and poetically written, with lines that quite nearly gutted me. The characters are very well fleshed out, especially Lucy, who was so humanly relatable that her narration felt genuinely uncomfortably honest at times. Strongly recommended for anyone interested in explorations of character and relationships, sapphic / queer romances, and a good summery novel for when trying to romanticise Singapore autumn fails you. (4.5/5 ☆)