Light Years: A Girlhood in Hawai'i - Tapa dura

"A most beautiful book dedicated to two great loves: memory and literature." "There is a gentle luminosity to Susanna Moore's recollections, like the reflection of the sun in the sea." "Time and again Moore quotes from the classics of world and maritime literature with which she grew up. The beauty of her own book, however, remains unmistakable throughout." "Marvelous tales of a lost paradise, of love and of the sea."

Susanna Moore can't remember the first time she saw the ocean--it has been there for as long as she can remember. Moore was born in Hawai'i and raised in a paradise of light and color, five days' ship travel from the U.S. mainland. As a child she spent endless sun-speckled days in the shade of the palm trees with a bundle of books, the sound of the ocean and the calls of her brothers and sister drifting through the grove. In Light Years: A Girlhood in Hawai'i, she weaves reminiscences of her childhood with some of her favorite pieces of literature--excerpts from Robinson Crusoe, Moby Dick, Treasure Island, Kon-Tiki, To the Lighthouse, and many others. Although Moore now lives in New York, the sea remains her constant companion. Light Years marks her return to the island world where she walked to school barefoot and explored love as a young girl.