Shine Shine Shine

Shine Shine Shine - Lydia Netzer

From Goodreads: Sunny Mann has masterminded a life for herself and her family in a quiet Virginia town. Her house and her friends are picture-perfect. Even her genius husband, Maxon, has been trained to pass for normal. But when a fender bender on an average day sends her coiffed blonde wig sailing out the window, her secret is exposed. Not only is she bald, Sunny is nothing like the Stepford wife she’s trying to be. As her facade begins to unravel, we discover the singular world of Sunny, an everywoman searching for the perfect life, and Maxon, an astronaut on his way to colonize the moon.

 

Theirs is a wondrous, strange relationship formed of dark secrets, decades-old murders and the urgent desire for connection. As children, the bald, temperamental Sunny and the neglected savant Maxon found an unlikely friendship no one else could understand. She taught him to feel -- helped him translate his intelligence for numbers into a language of emotion. He saw her spirit where others saw only a freak. As they grew into adults, their profound understanding blossomed into love and marriage.

 

But with motherhood comes a craving for normalcy that begins to strangle Sunny’s marriage and family. As Sunny and Maxon are on the brink of destruction, at each other’s throats with blame and fear of how they’ve lost their way, Maxon departs for the moon, where he’s charged with programming the robots that will build the fledgling colony. Just as the car accident jars Sunny out of her wig and into an awareness of what she really needs, an accident involving Maxon’s rocket threatens everything they’ve built, revealing the things they’ve kept hidden. And nothing will ever be the same. 

 
This was an interesting novel. I kind of cringe at my choice of words, interesting seems like such a throwaway word, but I can't seem to come up with anything else that makes sense. There were so many layers of this novel and each chapter...in addition to moving the plot forward, each chapter served as a way to delve deeper into Sunny and Maxon's history together and apart. 
 
I'm not sure if I liked the characters in Shine Shine Shine, or at least Sunny and her family. I liked Maxon better, if only because he was unable to hide things and everything for him was black and white. 
 
I'm not sure what I feel about Shine Shine Shine. I did like it overall and I'm looking forward to reading more by Lydia Netzer but it was one of those books that leaves you with ambiguous feelings that never quite seem to reconcile.