Join the (book) club — Lill’s Library is a biweekly series where former KidLit agent intern and avid reader Lillian Heckler tells you what young adult titles are taking up space on her bookshelf. This week, we’re reading Sunburn by Chloe Michelle Howarth.

I’m in my second-to-last semester of graduate school, and I still haven’t found a way to enjoy annotating assigned readings. It doesn’t matter if I like the text or not or if I have complicated thoughts to work out about it. Something about marking up a finished piece of writing makes my brain short-circuit. 

It’s the same with the books I read for pleasure, but for different reasons. I have a pretentious urge to keep my books in pristine condition, no matter how many times I read them. I can’t bring myself to mar their plainness — the crisp pages, the clean margins. It just feels more respectful that way.

When I picked up the next book on my to-be-read pile, though, I found myself with an inexplicable and unstoppable desire to scribble pen ink all over the pages. The story that broke my annotation rule is October’s book club pick, Sunburn by Chloe Michelle Howarth.

Set in a rural Irish town in the 1990s, Sunburn traces the heartwrenching evolution of a friendship between two teenage girls as their bond shifts into something more forbidden. 

Lucy, the narrator, is a quiet, observant girl who was taught to be “good” before she was taught to be honest. She is a dutiful Catholic bound by her mother’s expectations that she will marry her neighbor, Martin, raise children, and never step out of line. Lucy intends to obey those commands — even when “beautiful sunbeam Susannah” saves a seat for Lucy at the chipper in the first chapter, even when Lucy spends her time in that seat thinking about “the warmth and the wet of [Susannah’s] mouth.”

A sharp-edged, clever girl from a fractured home, Susannah is Lucy’s opposite in nearly every way. Her absent father disappeared to his second family in Susannah’s early adolescence and her noncommittal mother frequently leaves her alone in their grand house, Croft Hall, for days at a time. Despite this, Susannah maintains her grades and keeps up in social circles. She spends much of her time thinking introspectively, working through how she might make a life for herself outside of Crossmore. She only admits that she’s “very lonely at home and that she misses her father and that she doesn’t have the things she needs,” when she finds herself in the dark with Lucy.

Susannah becomes fascinated by Lucy’s quiet demeanor and reluctance to challenge her environment, while Lucy’s obsession with Susannah’s mouth expands to include her unshaven knee, her eyes, and her intelligence. After they spend nearly every moment of the summer of 1991 together, tanning in the Croft Hall garden and exchanging handwritten notes, the girls realize that what binds them isn’t just their shared experience of an otherwise monotonous town, but love.

I’d been meaning to read Sunburn for over a year but I hadn’t expected very much from it. Young adult romance novels are typically a hard sell for me; I get horrific second-hand embarrassment and usually have to stop reading within the first few chapters. 

As predicted, after a few pages of Sunburn, I had to put it down. But it wasn’t because I disliked it. I had to stop reading because I liked it too much. Just one chapter of Howarth’s raw prose left me so utterly exposed that I had to grab a pen and start marking up the paragraphs in a desperate attempt to metabolize every detail. It was this line on page 11 that pushed me over the edge: “It makes perfect sense to want to be inside her mouth, to be torn to pieces by her; until I catch myself wanting it, and I am shocked, I am disgusted.”

Howarth’s prose is deliberate and cinematic, with a sense of pace that is unhurried yet relentless; the mere 24 chapters span the happenings of six years, and Lucy says herself in the third chapter that “time is hard and soft at once in [the town of] Crossmore.” Howarth writes with the precision and detail of someone who remembers every sting of adolescence. She captures the slow, blistering ache of queer awakening — the thrill and the shame, the hiding and the wanting — with such accuracy that it hurts. What makes Sunburn so impactful isn’t only its portrayal of first love, but its understanding of what comes after: the residue that lingers when summer ends, when growing up means learning to live with the burn. As the story unfolds, the novel’s title becomes a metaphor not only for desire’s burn, but for the ache of memory itself.

Beneath the surface of its coming-of-age romance, Sunburn is a story about compulsory heterosexuality, inherited shame, and the quiet violences of self-denial. Lucy’s desire is never neat or declarative; it is confused, half-buried, and often painful. She frequently runs from the reality of who she is, defecting instead to the social safety that Martin’s presence brings. “If only I had never spotted the tortuous loveliness of her. If only I wasn’t afraid to look inside myself, that way I might know better who I am,” Lucy laments in the spring of 1992. The novel asks how much of ourselves we can deny before the truth finds its way to the surface, blistered and bright.

Reading Sunburn rearranged something in me. It wasn’t just that I saw myself in the story, but that it felt like it had been written from inside my own chest. I found myself wanting to underline everything, as if I could hold onto each feeling longer by tracing it in ink. It marked me so definitely that I had to mark it back.

So, reader, open yourself to Sunburn. Let it see you, and move you, and burn you. It’ll leave its mark — but only in the best way.

Onto the next chapter.