Shine Shine Shine

May 14, 2012
From a distance, Netzer’s confident debut is the tale of “an astronaut lost in space, and the wife he left behind.” At its core, it is the story of the power of love to overcome the great accidents of the universe. Sunny was born totally hairless. Her husband, Maxon, is a rocket scientist, and together they have an autistic son named Bubber. It appears they live a normal suburban life in Virginia— Sunny wears a long blond wig and Bubber is medicated to keep him calm. But after Maxon leaves for a space expedition, a car accident reveals Sunny’s hairlessness to her friends and neighbors. Being outed causes Sunny to re-examine her life, and she begins to come to terms with herself as different but special. Meanwhile, Maxon’s expedition is jeopardized when a tiny rock “that had been hiding behind the moon” slams into his spaceship. As he and his crew struggle to survive, and Sunny embraces her family’s peculiarities, Netzer deftly illuminates the bonds that transcend shortcomings and tragedy. Characterized by finely textured emotions and dramatic storytelling, Netzer’s world will draw readers happily into its orbit. Agent: Caryn Karmatz Rudy, DeFiore and Company.

July 15, 2012
Netzer's debut, about a heavily pregnant woman left to care for her dying mother and autistic son while her Nobel-winning husband travels to the moon, takes the literary concept of charmingly quirky characters to a new level. Sunny is born in Burma in 1981 to missionary parents. After her father's death at the hands of the Communists, Sunny's mother, Emma, settles with Sunny in rural western Pennsylvania, where she mistakenly hopes Sunny will be accepted despite her glaring abnormality--she is hairless and permanently bald, and Emma will not allow her to wear a wig. Sunny finds her soul mate in Maxon, the youngest son of cartoonishly abusive white-trash parents. If Sunny is brilliant and a little odd, Maxon is a genius far along the autism continuum. For Maxon, whose work with artificial intelligence has made him rich and won him a Nobel by age 30, the boundary between human and robot is erasable. He plots interpersonal interactions in terms of mathematical formulas. Nevertheless, he and Sunny's love is shown as Shakespearian in its passion and depth. But when Sunny becomes pregnant with their son Bubber, maternal instincts push her toward conformity: wig wearing and suburbia. She wants to cure Bubber of the autism he has evidently inherited and becomes less patient with Maxon's exceptionality. Sunny is far along in her second pregnancy and coping with Emma's approaching death from cancer when Maxon leaves for his mission to colonize the moon with robots. While he faces a crisis in space that shows him how much his relationships on earth matter, Sunny stops wearing her wig, medicating Bubber to control him and maintaining Emma endlessly on life support. She drops her pretense of normality, only to realize that there may be no such thing as normal; everyone wears a metaphorical wig. Talky uplift and a self-congratulatory tone bog down the novel, but through compelling characters, Netzer raises a provocative question: Is autism a disability, a gift or the norm of the future?

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February 15, 2012

Sunny is the perfect wife leading the perfect life in small-town Virginia, with a husband she's managed to make look pretty standard-issue, too, though he's a brainy-to-distraction astronaut slated to help colonize the moon. Then a minor car crash sends Sunny's blonde wig flying, revealing that she's bald, and the normalcy these two have built up since meeting as oddball children starts to tumble. Lots of in-house enthusiasm for what seems to be a juicily wacky and engaging first novel.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2012
A completely hairless, pregnant housewife in Virginia is at the center of Netzer's whimsical first novel. The wife of a genius who has created robots to work on the moon and the mother of a young austistic boy, Sunny has donned a wig for the first time in her life in order to fit into suburban life, much to the dismay of her dying mother. As her husband, Maxon, heads to the moon on a shuttle to dispatch his robots, Sunny tries to come to grips with her comatose mother's impending demise. On the way back from the hospital, Sunny is in a car accident that knocks her wig from her head and jostles her out of her complacency. She chucks the wig for good and confronts her complicated feelings for Maxon and the state of their relationship, but it is a freak meteor strike in space that threatens their future. Netzer deftly weaves the story of how Sunny and Maxon met and fell in love and their present predicament, crafting a unique and moving love story.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)