On Sunlight Finds You by Kansas author Laura Moriarty
By Tracy Floriani
Hello, Tracy Floriani here coming to you from central Oklahoma with a summer reading
recommendation. This summer I've been reading Sunlight Finds You, the new novel by Kansas author Laura Moriarty. The book comes out August 4th, so be looking for it in the weeks ahead.
Of Laura Moriarty's four previous novels, you're most likely to be familiar with The Chaperone, which was a New York Times bestseller and then adapted into a 2018 feature film by the team who created Downton Abbey.
Her new novel, Sunlight Finds You, is the first of Moriarty's novels not set
in Kansas, but it does have a lot in common with her other books. Like The Chaperone, it's a historical novel. This one is set on the Gulf Coast of Florida in the 1950s. And like its predecessor, Sunlight Finds You features a long trip to unfamiliar territory that forces the protagonist to reckon with her sense of self.
Narrator, Nora, is a petite, bright, and bookish, but fairly average young woman trying to navigate her life among the social norms and institutions that seek to define in broad strokes the expectations of women and girls. Here, as in all of Moriarty's novels, you'll encounter life-altering challenges that force difficult choices for a girl's future. realistic characters rendered with a psychological complexity that makes us both root for them and get frustrated with them at times, and clear prose that moves along at an enjoyable pace, peppered with rich metaphors and allusions.
We first meet Nora as a child who tells us at the outset about losing her mother and the value she has held close ever since. The themes of honesty and small-scale justice come through in these introductory scenes, and when Nora's penchant for risk reveals itself in a clever prank to get back at a teacher who belittles his students. Her distaste for lying is then shown in her creative effort to avoid having to lie to protect herself after the prank.
Early in the story too, her working class, now blended family moves to Florida from Missouri. And throughout the rest of the book, we get a nice sense of what Florida was like for locals as it boomed in the years after World War II and into the onset of the Korean War.
Nora is outgoing and quickly develops a small friend group when she starts at her new high school. She then expands this group by befriending another transplant, the smart and athletic but socially awkward Leonard, who has moved there from New York with his wealthy parents. Of course, they eventually fall in love, and many of the teenage
conflicts and betrayals you might anticipate come to pass.
But what this novel does differently is to explore the love affair mostly through Nora's mind in isolation, as she engages with higher stakes situations of honesty and justice, and as she gradually bends to social expectations to become someone she no longer recognizes as herself. We experience Nora coming of age through a gradual evolution in the maturity of her voice, and this occurs alongside her evolving and complicated relationships with her stepmother, May, Leonard's mother, Mrs. Lifton, and her own upbringing in the segregated South. In this, we get an intergenerational exploration of
women's lives across social classes during that era. Surprisingly, there are also subtle nods to Jane Eyre here, and as with that classic novel, sticking with the protagonist through her trials and moral crises pays off in a satisfying ending.
This has been Tracy Floriani for the High Plains Public Radio Readers Book Club. Enjoy your summer reads.
