Lydia Netzer

This was an unexpected delight. The love story of a man, Maxon, who uses pseudocode to define his verbal and emotional responses to the world and his wife, Sunny, born with complete alopecia in Burma. The real heart of the novel is the tension between Sunny's desire to fit in with the world as it is, and hide her baldness, as a metaphor for the things that make us different from others, coming to terms with wanting to be the hero of a world of one's own making, with those who are different show more from us being the outsiders.

The writing is gorgeous. The story beneath the story, of Maxon going to help colonize the moon is interesting and numerous backstories flesh out both characters as full, flawed people, not just subject to the plot. show less

How I adore Sunny and Maxon. They are unusual people trying to make their honest way in a world that puts them at outs with ‘normal’ people. Sunny’s observations are devastating and Maxon’s are robotic and mathematical. They harbor an unconditional love for each other that supercedes all lies, decisions, secrets, and events. I have no doubt that they will make it.

The backstory comes out gradually and not sporadically, with the deep and dark secrets only revealed grudgingly, almost show more glancingly. Telling it any other way would have given it more importance than it needed, the secrets would have overshadowed what Sunny and Maxon are making of their lives.

How could Rache know anything, when Sunny had been lying to her from the start? But she put that thought in the box, and she closed the box. And the screaming, and the tearing at herself, and the crawling under her bed to wait for death, was packed into the box, and the box was shut, and taped shut, and she would not open the box, or think about the box. p. 187

Every page is lyrical, every page presents things in a new or additional light. Mistakes have been made, lives changed by dramatic decisions, but everything is going to be okay.

I found this book amazingly hopeful in a very crazy world. show less

This unusual novel, Shine, Shine, Shine, features a Nobel-winning scientist, his wife who is torn between her exquisite eccentricity and her desire for normalcy, their brilliant, autistic son, and a baby on the way. The husband Maxon is clearly but cheerfully on the spectrum himself, and is the key to colonizing the moon. Somewhere around 29 years old, he is an artist when it comes to robots, making them able to cry, laugh and dream - and make more robots.

"There are three things robots show more cannot do: . . . Show preference without reason (LOVE) . . . Doubt rational decisions (REGRET) . . . Trust data from a previously unreliable source (FORGIVE)".

Maxon has preference without reason for childhood friend Sunny, and she reciprocates. There are some concise mathematical analyses of human behavior in the book (created by the author's coder husband and a mathematician friend), as Sunny and her brave mother Emma educate neglected Maxon on how to interface with the world. Maxon is tall, geeky and (to Sunny at least), sexy, and her congenital baldness (reminiscent of movie robots) is part of his overwhelming attraction to her.

Maxon is heading to the moon, with his robots who will build other robots and the foundation for an Earth colony. But something goes awry, and his genius will be needed if he and the crew are even to survive. Meanwhile, Sunny's mother is dying and Sunny is pregnant. Circumstances drive Sunny to rethink the life of normalcy she has created in the hope their son (and impending baby) won't experience the difficulties growing up that she and Maxon did.

In an afterword interview, the author explains, "{A}s a weirdo who is married to a weirdo and parenting two weirdos, I am saddened by our modern need to make sure everyone fits in, and functions smoothly, and checks all the necessary boxes. Some amazing and brilliant people do not, and never will, fit in."

The novel celebrates the beauty and challenges of not fitting in, and reflects on the desire to be normal, and the bravery needed to be just who you are. I loved it. Not quite 5 stars - the structure was a little jumpy for me in places - but close. show less

George and Irene were destined to fall in love. Their astrologer moms came up with a plan to get pregnant at the same time, give birth on the same date, raise their children together and then separate them so they would one day find each other again as soulmates.

Twenty-nine years later:

Irene Sparks is an astrophysicist. In her Pittsburgh lab she has just made an extraordinary scientific breakthrough creating black holes and has been offered a prominent position at the Toledo Institute of show more Astronomy. At the same moment Irene makes her scientific discovery, her mother suffers a fatal fall down the stairs.

George Dermont is an instructor at the Toledo Institute of Astronomy. He has just been told to move out of his lab. They have given it to Irene. They gave her his lab assistant too. George doesn’t seem very upset and wonders if Irene has brown hair. When he does meet her, the connection between the two is immediate. And Irene has brown hair.

Joining George and Irene are a cast of peculiar characters ranging from the baffling to the bizarre. In between chapters on George, Irene, and their budding romance, we move back in time 29 years to learn about their births, and how their moms, Sally and Bernice, came up with, and implemented, a plan for their children to be soulmates. In the present Irene must reconcile her feelings about her estranged, and now deceased, alcoholic mother now that she has moved back to her childhood home in Toledo.

To call this book quirky is an understatement. Original and clever, it’s a magical journey of romance and mysticism woven together with science, mathematics and astronomy. At times baffling and often unfathomable, there was much to like about George and Irene’s tale. And while I enjoyed the book, I wasn’t able to fully immerse myself into the magical aspect of predestined love determined by the stars. Perhaps the reality of hard science was getting in my way.

For those looking for something different and open to the unusual, this is a book worth picking up. show less