A road trip story of two women—one rich and alluring, the other just another planet in her dazzling orbit—and their fervid and troubled friendship, rekindled after years of estrangement.
...by and large, the novel is grounded in the richness of its characters, and especially in the portrait of female friendship that Shapiro has painted. In their different ways, these two women turn to one another with very human, very ambivalent needs ... Shapiro’s writing is light and lovely, evoking the sun of her title.
Shapiro adroitly conveys the women’s complicated intimacy, their shared history and private jokes ... there is a mirroring Oedipal dream in this perceptive, carefully layered novel ... Lee’s erotic pull, inherited from her father, is a rich loam feeding the women’s friendship. Shapiro turns over just enough of this to satisfy our curiosity.
The parts of The Sun in Your Eyes that linger most in my mind are the settings and moods that Shapiro creates: the golden, hazy college summer when Lee and Viv become friends ... It's difficult to evoke nostalgia without becoming maudlin or sentimental, but Shapiro pulls it off, enough to justify the bond that holds Viv and Lee so tightly.
