Tag: Lydia Netzer

Shine Shine Shine – giveaway closed!

Posted on by Adventures With Words

The lucky winners of Shine Shine Shine by Lydia Netzer have now been chosen and contacted – have a look in your Twitter DM inbox or Facebook Message inbox to see if you’ve been lucky this time, and send us back your contact details so we can get your copies sent out ASAP.

We’ve loved our first giveaway and we’ve got a few goodies to give away in the future alongside upcoming reviews.

Lydia Netzer on Shine Shine Shine

Posted on by Adventures With Words

We’re really pleased to bring you this interview with Lydia Netzer, about her wonderful book Shine Shine Shine, in which we discover how difficult it is to live up to your own expectations, and those of others, especially when you don’t see the world the same way as everyone else.  I wanted to ask Lydia about how she came to write the book in the way that she did… Continue reading “Lydia Netzer on Shine Shine Shine” →

Shine Shine Shine by Lydia Netzer – review update

Posted on by Adventures With Words

I first reviewed Shine Shine Shine by Lydia Netzer last year, when we were lucky enough to receive a copy of the proof – as you can see from my review below I really enjoyed the book and Lydia’s originally – unique? – writing style.  Coming back to the book, for the release of the paperback edition, I think I enjoyed it even more.

This time, the relationship between Sunny and her mother really stood out to me – the tension between doing the best for yourself and doing the best for your children spoke to me even more strongly.  I also thought, again, more strongly this time, that the way in which Lydia evokes Maxon’s austistic nature was fascinating – it was quite amazing seeing the world, and space, through his eyes.  This time, I had tears in my eyes as I finished reading this beautiful, tragi-comic family drama. Continue reading “Shine Shine Shine by Lydia Netzer – review update” →

Books in the post: Shine Shine Shine by Lydia Netzer

Posted on by Adventures With Words

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, they are married, and Sunny wants, more than anything, to be ‘normal’. But her husband is on a NASA mission to the moon, and a meteor is heading his way. Sunny wishes Maxon would turn the rocket around and come straight home. It’s not an easy life being the wife of an astronaut, the daughter of a sick mother, the mother to an autistic son and a supportive ear to your friends. Nor is it easy to be a fragile human being, a million miles away from home and family, alone in the great dark emptiness of space.

At the opening of Shine Shine Shine, these are exactly the positions Sunny and Maxon find themselves in. Lydia Netzer’s prose is flowing and smooth, but also unusual; it’s full of simile and metaphor. We view the world through the eyes on Sunny and Maxon in turn, including the way in which their worries and neuroses warp their perception and therefore ours. So a crack in a wall by the pantry noticed by Sunny is deep and gaping, but then in fact is tiny and barely noticeable. When she visits her mother in hospital, although she is dying on the inside, Sunny puts that out of her mind, focussing on her external beauty, including the vines – tubes and wires – curling around her limbs and growing from her mouth.

I found this ‘making strange’ tech type really refreshing. Shine Shine Shine is a very fresh, atypical telling of what is really a universal story of love and families parted and reunited.

Shine Shine Shine is out on the 5th July from Simon & Schuster.

Kate Neilan @Magic_kitten