Sunny is your typical suburban housewife: perfect home, perfect neighbors, toddler Bubber with a new baby girl on the way... But the cracks in that "perfect" world Sunny has constructed for herself quickly make themselves apparent in Shine Shine Shine, from Bubber's autism (and Sunny's internal struggle with whether his medicine and treatments are actually helping him) to Maxon, Sunny's brilliant but incredibly odd husband, to Sunny's own secrets that she's so desperate to hide from all of her friends and neighbors, to Sunny's dying mother. While Maxon hurtles through space, intent on placing his brilliantly constructed AI robots on the moon to help create the first moon colony, encountering his own trials and revelations on the journey, Sunny begins to let light shine through the cracks in her life, accepting and even embracing the imperfections. Sunny and Maxon's parallel present-day journeys are interspersed with recollections of their love story that started in their childhood.

Lydia Netzer, the author, recently described Shine Shine Shine in a single 140-character tweet as "Perfect mothers are not perfect. Strange husbands are not the problem. Robots keep you alive without asking if you want to live. Sex. Death." I'd say that's about as apt a description as I could ever come up with. It's one of the most unique books I've ever read, and I fell in love with it almost instantly.