Light Years

by Susanna Moore

Woven throughout the narrative are excerpts from authors like Darwin and Woolf, with a standout quote from an early 20th-century Hawaii visitor. The New Yorker's Susanna Moore's premise captivates, and her prose enchants with vivid depictions of her island upbringing. Moore's first sea encounter is a blur; it's always been a part of her life. Raised in 1950s Hawaii, she spent summers under palm trees, lost in literature that echoed the sea's tales. This memoir recounts her Hawaii childhood, from barefoot school walks to cultural encounters, and features an anthology of renowned sea writings. Moore, a Hawaii native and award-winning author, now resides in New York.

Genres: Memoir

195 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 2007

About the author

Susanna Moore is the author of the novels One Last Look, In the Cut, The Whiteness of Bones, Sleeping Beauties, and My Old Sweetheart, which won the Ernest Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for First Fiction, and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her nonfiction travel book, I Myself Have Seen It, was published by the National Geographic Society in 2003. She lives in New York City.

Reviews

[Jeanne · Rating 1 out of 5]

Wow! I haven't disliked a book this much since. . .

My grievances are as follows:

The title. Light Years: A Girlhood in Hawai'i is the most misleading title I've ever encountered. This book is NOT about her girlhood in Hawai'i.

The content. Each chapter begins with some random story about her childhood in Hawai'i (10 pages or less) and is then followed by pages and pages and pages of excerpts from books that the author allegedly read during her girlhood.

These excerpts comprise most of the book. And they're hard to read, as they are just thrown in there with no real purpose or introduction. I love great literature, but I have no desire to read Robinson Crusoe in bits and pieces.

The memoir portion. There's nothing particularly fascinating about her actual remembrances. And sometimes she includes things like Hawaiian history or myths.

I really do not understand the purpose of this book. At all.

[Angie Fehl · Rating 2 out of 5]

Oh good, the reviews here tell me I clearly wasn't the only one confused by the excerpts bits!

Susanna Moore grew up in the 1950s and 60s on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. Many locals considered her and her family "haole", a white & privileged family living in a fine home staffed with servants. Moore writes of attending cotillion classes at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. Her mother struggled with mental illness and sadly passed away when Moore was only 12 years old.

That's about the gist of what I learned from this super short (less than 200 pages) "memoir" of hers. I've heard of Susanna Moore as a writer but have not picked up any of her novels yet. I stumbled upon this at a discount sale one day and was intrigued mainly because my grandmother lived in Hawaii for a time (also where she met my grandfather) and her stories of island life always captured my attention as a child (have yet to see it for myself though). I was hoping for something similar from this book.

So that's where we run into the confusion with the excerpts. Moore writes, "I began to keep a journal about the sea by copying passages from the books I was reading..." but that's about the only explanation the reader gets for what follows: the large majority of this book just being long excerpts of OTHER people's work. I didn't have an issue with that by itself so much, but more with the fact that the excerpts have little to no preface. Other than many of them having the "sea" theme, there's not much explained as to WHAT about these fragments of books was so compelling to her. What about these passages specifically spoke to her? I would have been interested in those stories but no such luck. I ended up flipping past these pages as much of it was stuff I've already read over the course of my life.

That these excerpts make up the bulk of the book is what annoyed me so, rather than Moore sharing more of her OWN stories. If I pick up this book, I don't want an anthology of others, I want to hear about HER experiences, as the title promises. There is a little bit of that here, just not enough. Though there is a portion that I found interesting where she discusses the issue of racism running throughout the islands that has spanned for generations.

"It was a hierarchical, snobbish, and quietly racist society... there was a fairly unconscious racism all around us..." but then it turns weird because in some ways her words starts to sound as if she's trying to make it seem okay because you know, it's just how it was...

Yeah, in short... not all that impressed with this. Felt a bit like a lazy, thrown-together excuse for a book.

[Deborah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not finished yet, and will complete this review, but have to lament the lack of a (decent) copy editor for the paperback edition I'm reading. Lolo with typos - dat sloppiness, it bodda me - they shoulda done mo' bettah!
(Yeah, I know, pidgin never was and never will be a good look for me. I remember that one time a flash of courage pushed me toward the jostling, happy line of brown girls who ran the regular jump rope game at my public elementary school: "I like play - I can play wit' you?" I wasn't allowed to speak pidgin at home, and I wasn't experienced at code-switching. My voice came out so strangled, and they were all having so much fun, laughing, play arguing, they probably didn't even hear me. Maybe they were just able to pretend they didn't? Either way, I couldn't summon up a second spark of courage to ask again, so pretended I never asked and slunk off to my usual recess reading spot on the water drainage grate, where the salty taste of outsiderness and unbelonging couldn't drown me.)

[Rachael]

I really wanted to like this book; I was hopeful that previous reviews would not be my own experience. Unfortunately, I have to agree with other reviewers. The author included too many excerpts (for my liking at least) from books she read and enjoyed in her younger years. I could not find the connection between those excerpts and her own personal experiences and memories of her childhood.

[Catie Huang · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is the second book by Susanna Moore that I have read where she intersperses her writing with literature that seems very loosely connected to her prose. I find it disruptive to the flow of her narrative. It’s almost as if she wants to prove that she is literary.

[Laurel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Her prose was only long enough to have read it in a New Yorker article while waiting for my psychiatrist.

[Pierre Maes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Exceptional picture of a teen-ager woman & hibiscuses !? Pool, bleachers or.... open-water ?

[Kathy Hiester · Rating 3 out of 5]

Susanna Moore paints compelling pictures with words. She begins her chronicle with "No memory presents itself of my first acquaintance with the sea. It was always there, and I was always in it." What I soon discovered was that the pictures she paints are not so much of herself, but of the place she happened to be at the time, the oceans that surrounded it, and the books that kept her company.
Moore employs an bizarre arrangement for this book. Following each brief chapter is at least an equal number of pages filled with excerpts from classic stories of the sea, the regular companions of her youth. In her first chapter she says "One summer when my mother was recovering from a breakdown, we lived on the beach..." but never goes into any detail. Later she writes "I was overcome by the idea of shipwreck. I suspect the unconscious was doing its work. My family, while high-strung, was not a shipwreck quite yet, but I divined its coming." I battled through twenty pages of shipwreck tales from Daniel Defoe and John Fiske, anxious to get back to Susanna's own story, only to find that it never really happens.
Although I came away with a very beautiful picture of Hawaii, the "ravishing little world...redolent with romance" but also "an hierarchical, snobbish and quietly racist society," my depiction of the author remained unclear, and each chapter left me wanting more.

3 Stars

[Julia · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lot of people don't like this book because of the excerpts. However, I really liked them. I didn't find it interrupted the narrative, because she was not writing in chronological order anyway, and she was also just writing about random things. It's sort of a memoir, but not a typical one. She writes about her life, but mostly about how she was affected by the sea growing up, and the excerpts relate to that, as they are all about interactions people have with the sea. It's beautifully written. I was dreaming about being in Hawaii for days.

I enjoyed reading it, even though I have never read any of Susanna Moore's books or even heard of her before reading her memoir. To be honest, I was drawn to it because of the pretty cover - I love the colours. I also read it because I needed a memoir for the 2015 Popsugar reading challenge and I saw it at the library.

[Dagný · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just went to Hawaii for the first time, a short trip to Oah'u. I picked up this book by Susanna Moore just before I left and it was a delightful companion. I was so pleased to find something to anchor an interest in the place (although it was lovely; the ocean colors, the breezes, the music). To have stories, past happenings, to guide an experience of a place is much more interesting. This beautiful little book has short glimpses of Moore's reminiscences of growing up in Hawaii ( Oah'u) and woven between are excerpts about the ocean from almost 50 authors, from Herodotus, Defoe, Melville,Conrad, Woolf, etc and including Hawaiian tales.

[LeGrand · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was prepared to really love this book and perhaps that is why I was so extremely disappointed in it. I really enjoyed all of her own personal stories about Hawaii. Unfortunately however the majority of the book is excerpts from other books and while they are selected appropriately and are relevant to her own story, I think this book would have been better if she had stuck to telling her own tales/story. She is a good writer and having lived in Hawaii, I found her insights and stories to be something that were very believable, humorous, sad and overall quite entertaining.

[Megan Anderson · Rating 1 out of 5]

I enjoyed the memoir sections, but the excerpts from other authors' works really dragged down the whole book for me. They interrupted the flow, and honestly? I picked up the book because I wanted to read about her life. If I wanted to read, say, something by Robert Louis Stevenson, I'd have read one his books. Extremely disappointing.

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this book. The author grew up on O'ahu at the same time my father did, so her stories were familiar to me like not having to wear shoes to school. Honestly, I skipped the author's book and poetry exerpts at the end of each chapter. I just read her memoir sections and I found them to be lovely.

[H]

I was aware that while I didn't yet understand what it meant to be attached to this Earth, I did not want to make the mistake of imagining that myth was something available to everyone. I understood that myth was a luxury. (47)

[Laura · Rating 1 out of 5]

I started this book and couldn't get into it. Very disappointed as I had been waiting to read this for a long time.

[Maureen Flatley · Rating 5 out of 5]

A reread of an old favorite.....delightful.