SHINE SHINE SHINE
When Maxon met Sunny he was seven years, four months and eighteen days old. Or, he was 2693 rotations of the earth old. Maxon was different. Sunny was different. They were different together.
Now, twenty years later, they are married, and Sunny wants, more than anything, to be “normal.” She’s got the housewife thing down perfectly, but Maxon, a genius engineer, is on a NASA mission to the moon, programming robots for a new colony. Once they were two outcasts who found unlikely love in one another: a wondrous, strange relationship formed from urgent desire for connection. But now they’re parents to an autistic son.
When Maxon met Sunny he was seven years, four months and eighteen days old. Or, he was 2693 rotations of the earth old. Maxon was different. Sunny was different. They were different together.
Now, twenty years later, they are married, and Sunny wants, more than anything, to be “normal.” She’s got the housewife thing down perfectly, but Maxon, a genius engineer, is on a NASA mission to the moon, programming robots for a new colony. Once they were two outcasts who found unlikely love in one another: a wondrous, strange relationship formed from urgent desire for connection. But now they’re parents to an autistic son. And Sunny is pregnant again. And her mother is dying in the hospital. Their marriage is on the brink of imploding, and they’re at each other’s throats with blame and fear. What exactly has gone wrong?
Sunny wishes Maxon would turn the rocket around and come straight the hell home.
When an accident in space puts the mission in peril, everything Sunny and Maxon have built hangs in the balance. Dark secrets, long forgotten murders, and a blonde wig all come tumbling to the light. And nothing will ever be the same…
A debut of singular power and intelligence, Shine Shine Shine is a unique love story, an adventure between worlds, and a stunning novel of love, death and what it means to be human.
- St. Martin's Press
- Hardcover
- July 2012
- 320 Pages
- 9781250007070
Buy the Book
$24.99
About Lydia Netzer
Lydia Netzer was born in Detroit and educated in the Midwest. She lives in Virginia with her two home-schooled children and mathmaking husband. When she isn’t working as a book doctor, blogging, or drafting her second novel, she writes songs and plays guitar in a rock band.
Praise
"From the icy dead surface of the moon to the hot center of the human heart, Lydia Netzer’s debut novel takes you on a journey that will rattle your bones. Part science fiction, part pure magic of the human kind, Netzer makes a book that is wholly her own, and endlessly fascinating. At every turn, you think she cannot astonish you again, and then she does it one more time. And then again and again and again. This is an astounding first novel by a writer who is unique in her immense gifts."—Robert Goolrick, #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Reliable Wife
"Creating one of the most compelling protagonists I’ve read in a long time, Lydia Netzer manages to capture the outsider in each of us. Whether looking at the moon, a child, the suburban landscape, or the face in the mirror, Netzer shows us something we’ve never seen before, something we thought we knew. A beautifully written story where the exception proves the rule: the things that seem to divide us are, ultimately, the very things that unite us."—Brunonia Barry, New York Times bestselling author of The Lace Reader and The Map of True Places.
“A perfectly structured gem of a book that held me spellbound as I unraveled the twisted histories of this unconventional family. You’ve never read anything like it, and yet Sunny’s story is every woman’s story. We are all outsiders, all alone in space, all trying so hard to find a place called home. I loved this book.”—Joshilyn Jackson, New York Times bestselling author of gods in Alabama and Backseat Saints
“An astronaut, an autistic child, a bald woman and a meteor collide, churning up the ground around a couple of decades-old murders. Life and death intersect in this wildly inventive love story I will be talking about and thinking about for years to come. If Yann Martel and Mary Gaitskill had a literary baby, it would look a lot like Lydia Netzer.”—Karen Abbott, New York Times bestselling author of Sin in the Second City and American Rose