#james dickson

Mercury's Ancient Volcanic Plains !

Perspective view of ancient volcanic plains in the northern high-latitudes of Mercury revealed by instruments on board the MESSENGER spacecraft.

Most of us who are over 20 can point to a few big events that set us on the road to adulthood. For the never-named narrator of M.O. Walsh’s debut novel, My Sunshine Away, it was the rape of his teen crush during her sophomore (his freshman) year of high school, Lindy Simpson. The narrator and Lindy have been neighbors since grade school, during which time he has harbored an innocent, but obsessive love for her. The search for the unseen rapist—who knocked her off her bike and forced her face into the ground—brings all the neighborhood oddballs into suspicion. It also brings the narrator closer to realizing his puppy-like fantasy. Unfortunately, he implicates himself in the process, in multiple ways. During this time, his divorced parents are still acting out their drama, and then his sister is killed in a car accident, leaving no adult—except a loveable but unstable uncle—with time or emotional bandwidth to spare for him as he lurches toward maturity. There’s no shortage of coming-of-age novels. Among the qualities that distinguish this one is the memoir-like voice of the narrator and the unsentimental, yet forgiving examination of his immature self and his teenage posturing. Now grown and settled, the narrator understands that his actions were at once classic teen behavior and almost invariably the “wrong” thing to do, yet they revealed the true nature of the people around him, progressively peeling away his naïveté.