Sunny Beach, Sydney Greene’s fictional home, is a town of irony, more metaphor and paradox than a finger of sand along the ocean. The book paints a vivid symbolism of being so close to nature’s perfection while suffering inside a home of conflicting codas. Like many of us who felt the absence of a parent - whether they lived with us or not - Sydney uses life as an amplified game of trial and error. She experiences the world with a raw-nerve reality that feels eerily familiar, making you want to yank her from the pages and tell her everything is going to be okay. Not that Sydney is helpless, on the contrary, she is, at turns, pretty, precocious, and calculating, tiptoeing through the minefield of adolescence with dexterity and vulnerability. If she wants something, she will burn someone to get it. You need not physically lose a parent to live life without one, as we learn through the young girl who grows with each page. Caught in the emotional crossfire between an adoring father and a vapid mother, Sydney is forced to navigate the perilous path of childhood, adolescence and adulthood, all with one parental arm tied behind her back. At times, Sydney is helpless and Herculean, innocent and insatiable. She laments the labyrinth of life, but keeps plugging along with an almost reflexive or instinctive sense that the next day is the guardian of some secret glory or, at least, a resounding answer. The book’s title is at times a statement, mission statement, and battle cry. To paraphrase The Bard himself - What’s In A Name? - we find that Sydney is more than a name and a girl. Sydney is also a symbol, a surrogate for all of us who find our identity vicariously through people other than our parents. When she falls you want to pick her up, but there’s great rewards to be realized by going it alone, as she learns to help herself. As Syd blooms into adulthood, you see the spunky kid morph into a self-reliant, self-effacing, charming woman who is flawed, but refreshingly so. Sydney Greene climbs the ladder of her soul, each rung harder than the last, until she finds her spirit.
