Sixteen-year-old Reece Avery lives a risky life in the underbelly of South Florida, a desperate kind of life she wants to shake. She longs for stability, normalcy, and friends. Yet her life on the run has denied her these things. Abducted by her father when she was a young child, she was told her mother is dead. She fears she has nowhere to turn, and her only option is to stay with her erratic, lawbreaking father. This is a bad choice, however, as that father is the one who sends Reece crawling into dumpsters of rotting foods looking for anything they can use or sell. He propels her toward shoplifting and has strict rules about avoiding friendships to keep them under the radar of the authorities.
So begins Sun Don’t Shine (Fitzroy Books 2024) by Crissa-Jean Chappell. That things will only get worse for Reece is clear from the first chapter.
Her father can’t or won’t hold a job and remains fearful of prosecution, so they constantly move about and are forced at times to live in his van. When they do barely manage to avoid homelessness by staying in battered hotels, danger hovers in the dirty halls and stairways. The threat of sexual assault lies in wait, too, in those dank hallways among meth heads and crack abusers. It’s a brutal life for a teen, and even with Reece’s resiliency and strength, it will be hard for her to survive let alone flourish.
Reece has a prominent facial birthmark, and her father’s attempt to get rid of the mark creates one of the harrowing, though brief, scenes in the book. Reece describes it this way:
The stain above my left eyebrow is the color of those soy sauce packets you get with Chinese take-out. From a distance, it’s the shape of a Luna moth’s wing. Up close, it’s more like a scab. It’s always been there and it’s never going away.
Despite the fact she usually hides the stain by wearing a bandana, her father decides to remove the mark. He is not motivated by any desire to make her more attractive but seeks to make her less identifiable to authorities. When he tries to burn off the birth mark, readers—if they had any doubts before—will understand just how dangerous it is for Reece to stay with this man.
Hygiene is another problem as Reece is often forced by necessity to wear the same clothes (clothes pulled from dumpsters no less) several days in a row. Often, as they move about, bathing is difficult. Reece reflects in one scene after a kid in school shames her for smelling “ripe” that she has “spent a lot of time crying in bathrooms. Especially when [she] and Dad were living in the van. The nearest gas station was the only place where [she] could do normal stuff. Brush [her] teeth. Take a shower. Or a ‘bird bath’ as Dad called it. He tried to act like this was okay. Maybe even fun.”
The relationship between Reece and her father is complicated. She feels a certain loyalty, or at least a need not to betray him to the authorities, even though that would seem the most logical thing for her to do. Complicating this already difficult situation, Reece meets a boy, Shawn, who rather inexplicably takes a shine to her. Perhaps it is the old “opposites attract,” or maybe Shawn gets dubious thrills by taking up with someone so much wilder and tougher than he is. Regardless of why he is initially attracted to her, his affection appears sincere but will have unforeseen repercussions. For Reece, Shawn is nearly everything she wishes she could be: well-to-do with an apparently close-knit family, and the confidence and freedom that comes with those privileges.
Sun Don’t Shine has thriller pacing at times as the plot unfolds and is marketed primarily as Young Adult. Yet it reads like a modern coming-of-age novel in which Reece must confront who she is and balance that against who she wishes to become. An underlying social commentary about the need for more and better safe places for troubled teens is an adult message. Secondary themes about recovered memory, childhood trauma, and trust also seem aimed at a mature audience.
The writing in Sun Don’t Shine is captivating. The author knows exactly how to pull the readers into Reece’s narrow South Florida world. The opening paragraph is a fine example of the quality writing in which the author shows us something of Reece’s character while establishing the down-but-not-out tone: “When somebody moves out, they always leave stuff behind. If I’m lucky, it was there all along, waiting for me to find it.” That Reece is a scavenger by necessity is quickly clear, and these opening sentences also set out a theme—that for Reece, the life she wants is waiting for her to find it.
Crissa-Jean Chappell
Crissa-Jean Chappell comes originally from Miami, where she also attended college, and she makes good use of her knowledge of the area in the South Florida setting in Sun Don’t Shine. These days Chappell lives in Brooklyn, New York. She holds a PhD and MFA from the University of Miami and has taught creative writing and cinema studies for over fifteen years.
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