![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/10\/shineshineshine.jpg\" "\\"shineshineshine\\"")
<\/a>Lydia Netzer’s debut novel, Shine, Shine, Shine<\/em>, is unlike any novel I’ve ever read.\u00a0 If I sum up the plot, I risk eliminating the many joys of the book, not the least of which is the very human heart that beats at the center of the story.\u00a0 In fact, the book is about just that \u2013 what it means to be human, to be an outsider, to be loved and to love.<\/p>\n\u00a0Sunny and Maxon meet in childhood and form a bond that later becomes a marriage bond.\u00a0 Maxon, an odd genius, works for NASA in the robotics department, where he is developing robots to colonize the moon.\u00a0 Sunny, the blond, perfect wife tries to raise their son, Bubber, who is autistic, while her mother is in the hospital dying and Sunny is expecting a second child.\u00a0 When Maxon becomes an astronaut on a mission to the moon, everything changes, and Sunny begins to come to terms with her own uniqueness.<\/p>\n
\u00a0Sunny has a secret; she is completely bald. All that blond hair is fake.\u00a0 Matter of fact, much of the life Sunny has constructed for herself is phony. The truth is, she and Maxon are oddballs, misfits. What Sunny discovers during her own journey is that we are all outcast; we are all misfits. The trick is to learn to love those very qualities which make us, well, us.<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0 Netzer’s novel shines with insight, freshness and wisdom.\u00a0 It truly is unlike any book I’ve ever read, delightfully so.\u00a0 Here is the opening paragraph:<\/p>\n \u00a0Deep in darkness, there was a tiny light.\u00a0 Inside the light, he floated in a spaceship.\u00a0 It felt cold to him, floating there.\u00a0 Inside his body, he felt the cold of space.\u00a0 He could still look out the round windows of the rocket and see the Earth.\u00a0 He could also see the moon sometimes, coming closer.\u00a0 The Earth rotated slowly, relative to the things that were around it.\u00a0 There was nothing he could do now, one way or the other.\u00a0 He was part of a spaceship going to the moon.\u00a0 He wore white paper booties instead of shoes.\u00a0 He wore a jumpsuit instead of underwear.\u00a0 He was only a human, of scant flesh and long bone, eyes clouded and body breakable.\u00a0 He was off, launched from the Earth and floating in space.\u00a0 He had been pushed, with force, away.<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0Obviously, this is not an ordinary, predictable novel.\u00a0 It is much more like real life than that: full of twists and turns that help create us as we roll along, stumbling and bumbling our way to become that most mysterious machine of all \u2013 the human.<\/p>\n Netzer is a writer to watch. I can’t wait to see what she’ll do next.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Here\u2019s another offering by the indefatigable Anne Barnhill, who\u2019s hard at work on her next novel of Tudor England, but kindly takes time out to review books for Briar Patch. \u00a0By Anne Barnhill \u00a0SHINE, SHINE, SHINE. \u00a0By Lydia Netzer. St. Martin’s Press. 309 pages. $24.99, hardback. \u00a0Lydia Netzer’s debut novel, Shine, Shine, Shine, is unlike […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[223,332,331],"class_list":["post-879","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-contemporary-literary-fiction","tag-anne-barnhill","tag-contemporary-novels","tag-lydia-netzer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/879","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=879"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/879\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":881,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/879\/revisions\/881"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}