Review by bisexualbookshelf - Sunburn

bisexualbookshelf 's review for:

Sunburn by Chloe Michelle Howarth

4.25

emotional reflective tense slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

Thank you so much to Melville House for the gifted ARC! This book will release in the US on July 8th, 2025.

Set against the slow decay of rural Crossmore, Ireland in the early 1990s, Sunburn follows Lucy, a restless teenager desperate for something more than the small life she’s been promised. She’s smart, self-aware, and quietly burning with questions she’s not allowed to ask—about her future, about her mother’s suffocating expectations, and about her growing obsession with her friend Susannah. Chloe Michelle Howarth’s prose is lyrical and aching, capturing the wild tangle of girlhood, shame, and queer desire with such candor that I sometimes had to pause and catch my breath.

The story begins in the summer of 1989, as Lucy drifts through the slow, stifling days of adolescence in her rural town. With her best friend transferred to a different school and her mother’s love growing cold, Lucy clings to the brittle comforts of girlhood friendship and the familiar rhythms of small-town life. But everything shifts when she grows closer to Susannah—a glamorous, defiant girl with a fractured family and secrets of her own. Their friendship blooms into something electric and forbidden, forcing Lucy to reckon with feelings she can’t yet name. As the seasons change and the pressures of school, family, and conformity mount, Lucy must choose between the version of herself her mother expects and the one who yearns for freedom, for Susannah, and for a life outside the lines she's been handed.

This is not a fast book, nor an easy one. It meanders, like the long Irish summers it’s set in, and simmers with tension rather than boiling over. At times, I felt deeply frustrated with Lucy—particularly in her manipulation of Martin, the boy she uses as both shield and anchor—but that discomfort is also the point. Howarth gives us a narrator trapped in a world too small for her, clawing at identity with no roadmap and very little tenderness. Her confusion, her yearning, her cruelty—it all felt devastatingly honest.

What moved me most was the fierce intimacy between Lucy and Susannah, two girls navigating their love for each other in a place that cannot hold them. Their relationship is messy, secretive, intoxicating. I loved how the novel doesn’t try to flatten their connection into something pure or triumphant—it’s tender, yes, but it’s also political, painful, and heavy with consequence. There’s no perfect resolution, no “just come out” moment. Instead, we witness Lucy inch toward herself, slowly and not without cost.

📖 Read this if you love: queer coming-of-age stories steeped in longing and lyrical prose; messy girlhood, internalized shame, and slow-burning sapphic yearning; or books that ache with emotional honesty.

🔑 Key Themes: Repressed Desire and Queer Shame, Mother-Daughter Tension, Small-Town Surveillance, First Love and First Loss, The Politics of Conformity vs. Freedom.

Content Warnings