Light Years (2008)

In Light Years, short, lush memoir, novelist Susanna Moore (In the Cut) recalls her childhood in Hawaii, ''a ravishing little world'' where she ate guavas and mangoes straight off the tree, went to school shoeless until the sixth grade, and swam constantly in the Pacific Ocean. Moore evokes the sun-baked languor of her youth with such vivid sensuousness that you'll start pricing airline tickets to the islands. Unfortunately, she awkwardly pads her reminiscences with several dozen lengthy, sea-related passages from authors like Robert Louis Stevenson and Virginia Woolf, which you'll find yourself first skimming, then skipping. B