Please open https://hotaudiobook.com ONLY on your standard browser Safari, Chrome, Microsoft or Firefox to download full audiobooks of your choice for free.

Title: My Sunshine Away

Author: M.O. Walsh

Narrator: Kirby Heybourne

Format: Unabridged

Length: 10 hrs and 26 mins

Language: English

Release date: 02-10-15

Publisher: Penguin Audio

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 392 votes

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

My Sunshine Away unfolds in a Baton Rouge neighborhood best known for cookouts on sweltering summer afternoons, cauldrons of spicy crawfish, and passionate football fandom. But in the summer of 1989, when 15-year-old Lindy Simpson - free spirit, track star, and belle of the block - experiences a horrible crime late one evening near her home, it becomes apparent that this idyllic stretch of Southern suburbia has a dark side, too.

In My Sunshine Away, M.O. Walsh brilliantly juxtaposes the enchantment of a charmed childhood with the gripping story of a violent crime, unraveling families, and consuming adolescent love. Acutely wise and deeply honest, it is an astonishing and pause-register debut about the meaning of family, the power of memory, and our ability to forgive.

Editorial Reviews:

Editors Select, February 2015 - Set in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in the late eighties and early nineties, this rich atmospheric novel unfolds like a mystery. Gripping from the opening line, My Sunshine Away blends beautifully descriptive writing with thrilling suspense. The story comes together through the adolescent memories of the narrator, a neighborhood boy infatuated with Lindy Simpson the athletic and popular teen that lives down just down his suburban street. Lindy is brutally raped one summer evening, and the narrator happens to be one of the four suspects in the unspeakable crime. With glowing praise from best-selling authors Katheryn Stockett and Anne Rice, this debut novel is not to be missed.

Members Reviews:

Amazing

Unbelievably compelling debut novel. Read it with my book club and we were all blown away and ended up having a great meeting. My only criticism, and it is small, is that the narrator should have had a southern accent.

'I dreamt I held you in my arms...'

Another debut novel, and my faith in new authors continues to brighten -- and I say that after(struggling) listening to a story, that was somber from the opening sentence and weighed on me with almost every page. Therefore, I've given a lot of thought about how to approach this review without discouraging a possible reader. What sustains me through a read as difficult as this was is not only a strong story, writing and characters -- all those necessary elements Walsh does keenly -- it's the take away, the message, the lesson, and, while more nuanced than Aesop's moral, the no less present, moral of the story. My Sunshine Away is a story with a very nuanced message, or moral, that is especially relevant and necessary, handled with kid-soft gloves, (you can only see once you look back over what you just read).

Walsh skillfully sets up the listener at the very beginning with the assault, then gorges them with emotions by having you believe the story is being told directly to you by this 15 yr. old neighbor boy considered a suspect. In addition to the opening offense, it may be difficult to hear what teenage boys do behind locked bathroom doors, so bluntly. You'll wonder if the revelation of those raging hormones is necessary...it is to the narrator. Considered a suspect, his story feels confessional, both pleading his case and clearing his conscience.

The rape brings the real and gritty world crashing into the unspoiled neighborhood. Walsh creates a community of children suddenly stripped of their innocence and thrust into the darkest aspects of adulthood.