Netzer's munificence of spirit lights her story with compassion. peculiarities form an endearing story in Shine Shine Shine, Norfolk resident Lydia Netzer's first-and amazingly inventive-novel. Netzer has penned a modern take on alienation, building a family, making connections-creating memorable characters and an odd, idiosyncratic, but highly believable narrative along the way. After meeting Sunny and Maxon, I know I do. Or at least, a lot less alone in her imagined weirdness. Lydia Netzer says she wrote it when she was pregnant with her first child and feeling 'paralysed with fear that I was too weird, too self-absorbed, too unskilled to have a child, and that whatever baby had the bad luck to be born of my uterus would be permanently scarred by my failings.' Hopefully, she feels better now. This is a novel about the strangeness of being human.

What makes it unexpectedly moving is how skillfully Netzer then peels back those layers, finding heartbreaking depth even in characters who lack ordinary social skills.

Lydia Netzer’s luminous debut novel concerns what lies beneath society’s pretty surfaces-Sunny’s congenital hairlessness, her husband’s remoteness, their son’s autism. The novel traces Maxon and Sunny’s relationship from their childhoods in Burma and Appalachia to outer space, revealing the futility of chasing an ideal of what’s normal… Shine Shine Shine breaks free of the gravitational pull of traditional romantic cliches. But Netzer’s answer to how to be who you are is fresh from the heart. In this first novel, Lydia Netzer takes a hard look at being completely human through the eyes of two people who are kinda not… Shine, Shine, Shine may ask an old question. There are certain novels that are just twisty, delightfully so. Heart-tugging…it is struggling to understand the physical realities of life and the nature of what makes us human….Nicely unpredictable…Extraordinary.

Shine shine shine by lydia netzer