Check out this excerpt from Lydia Netzer’s upcoming novel Shine Shine Shine, out on July 17th (and don’t miss her post about movies that should have robots in them!):
When Maxon met Sunny, he was seven years, four months, and eighteen-days old. Or, he was 2693 rotations of the earth old. Maxon was different. Sunny was different. They were different together.
Now, twenty years later, they are married, and Sunny wants, more than anything, to be “normal.” She’s got the housewife thing down perfectly, but Maxon, a genius engineer, is on a NASA mission to the moon, programming robots for a new colony. Once they were two outcasts who found unlikely love in each other: a wondrous, strange relationship formed from urgent desire for connection. But now they’re parents to an autistic son. And Sunny is pregnant again. And her mother is dying in the hospital. Their marriage is on the brink of imploding, and they’re at each other’s throats with blame and fear. What exactly has gone wrong?
Sunny wishes Maxon would turn the rocket around and come straight-the-hell home.
When an accident in space puts the mission in peril, everything Sunny and Maxon have built hangs in the balance. Dark secrets, long-forgotten murders, and a blond wig all come tumbling to the light. And nothing will ever be the same.…
Sometimes a movie fails to inspire. Maybe it’s too slow, or the dialogue is flat. Maybe the characters spend too much time looking at the horizon, knitting their alabaster brows, feeling things so complex and soulful that normal people fall asleep watching them. Maybe it’s my editing heart or just my human desire not to be bored, but I often find myself thinking “What this movie needs is... an OCD fisherman on a meth binge” or “...a few more rabid dogs” or even “...Satan, arriving on a bicycle to rule the earth for a thousand years.”
