SUNFLOWER

Young love blossoms in 1990s Kansas in Morra’s debut YA novel.

Liv is 15 years old when her parents’ divorce uproots her from Buffalo, New York, and plops her down in rural Kansas. A trip to the neighborhood swimming hole leads to meeting Jack, a boy her age who becomes her first friend in her new town and, eventually, her boyfriend. That’s the basic premise of this 1990s-set narrative, which mostly succeeds at rising above the level of a rote tale of young love. Liv and Jack hit it off right away—his nickname for her, Sunflower, comes from the field next to the swimming hole—but finding each other ends up being the easy part. Jack soon finds out his mother is dying of cancer; once she is gone, he and his brother, Brandon, are left to contend with their mercurial father and the family’s failing farm. Jack quits high school to help on the farm, breaks up with Liv, and eventually puts the culinary skills he learned at his mother’s side to become a cook at a local restaurant. Along the way, family secrets are explored, and Jack and Liv continue to pine for each other.  The author creates two compelling characters in Liv and Jack, and we root for them from the beginning. Brandon is also nicely fleshed out, though a bevy of other characters, most notably Liv’s mother, Christine, and Christine’s boyfriend, Alex, are little more than filler. Though Morra’s adult characters could use more depth, her story is filled with twists and turns that keep the action moving swiftly, and the final pages are nicely written and extremely moving. Despite some shortcomings, the novel ably captures the essence of first love (“I immediately notice his eyes, intensely blue; they sparkle with his excitement like a lightning storm, and when he listens, they glow with calm, like a pristine lagoon. They draw me in, making it hard not to stare into them”) and the pains of growing up.

A heartfelt journey through the complexities of first love, family struggles, and the resilience of youth.