This is it! If I were really returning to the classroom next week, this would have been the panic point of the summer when I asked myself why I hadn't been able to find a great book to rave about to my new classes. Well no new classes and book found! Shine Shine Shine is a fresh, other-worldy, tear-jerking romance that illuminates the frailty of humanity. Sunny Mann is bald from birth, mother of a special needs child named Bubber, pregnant with her second child and married to Maxim, a nerdly NASA astronaut launched into space on a robot colonization mission. Through flashback, vignette, and symbolic near-poetic narration, Netzer tells how the couple met and fell in love as fragile children and now face the fears of the future as parents. There were lovely passages I wanted to copy long-hand -
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All life is binary. On and Off. There is no middle setting. Alive or dead. In love or not in love. Kissing or not kissing. Speaking or not speaking. One choice leads to another with no forks in the road." For a first novel, it blew my mind, made me cry and wish for that classroom of kids that I could shake this book in front of. Readers will be talking about this one for a while.
Check out this
Snappy robot song and quirky trailer for this book
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