Sunny Mann is a housewife in Norfolk, Virginia raising her four-year-old autistic son Bubber and trying to hide the fact that she is bald. Her husband, Maxon, is a brilliant roboticist and astronaut on a mission to the Moon to start a colony of robots. When a fender bender causes Sunny's wig to fly off and an accident in space threatens Maxon's life, family secrets start coming to light.
Shine Shine Shine contains examples of:
- Celeb Crush: Newscaster Les Weathers is not only a local celebrity but also Sunny's neighbor, and is a crush object for many women in the neighborhood.
- Childhood Friend Romance: Maxon and Sunny first met when Maxon was seven and Sunny was about six, when Maxon tried to hide out from his abusive father in a nearby abandoned farm only to find that Sunny and her mother had moved in. They were best friends throughout their childhood and realized their attraction to each other in high school.
- Dead Guy Junior:
- Bubber was named after Sunny's father Bob Butcher, a missionary in Burma who was executed on the orders of Ne Win
when Sunny was three. - Sunny names her daughter after her recently deceased mother Emma.
- Bubber was named after Sunny's father Bob Butcher, a missionary in Burma who was executed on the orders of Ne Win
- Dead Man Writing: After Emma's death, Sunny finds a letter written by her to Maxon, to be delivered to Sunny after her death, in which she admits that she turned Bob over to the authorities and got him executed so she and Sunny could leave Burma.
- Dedication: "For Benny and Sadie".
- Don't Make Me Take My Belt Off!: Maxon's father used to beat him with a wide variety of implements, including a belt.
- "Double, Double" Title: Shine Shine Shine.
- Dying Town: Sunny and Maxon grew up in Yates County, Pennsylvania, where oil was discovered in 1859. When the oil ran out, the wealthy inhabitants sold coal, then lumber. The money finally ran out in 1952, leaving a decaying town with surprisingly large houses.
- I Just Want to Be Normal: In middle school, Sunny became desperately embarrassed of her baldness. She begged Emma for a wig, but Emma refused. She even considered buying a hair growth tonic she read about in a magazine. As an adult, she was more accepting of herself until she got pregnant with Bubber, when she developed a craving for normalcy and started wearing wigs.
- Milholland Relationship Moment:
- Sunny has spent the last four years trying to maintain a perfect image and is afraid her friends will turn on her if they find out she's bald. But when her secret is exposed, she finds to her surprise that her friends like her more because she's more relatable.
- When Sunny was a child, she found Maxon's father trapped in a ravine with his legs broken. Instead of getting help, she left him there until he was found dead three days later. When she finally tells Maxon about it decades later, he tells her that he's known for years and isn't upset.
- No Medication for Me: After Sunny's wig blows off, she decides to stop obsessing over normalcy and takes Bubber off his Adderall and Dexedrine. A few hours later, while he's watching Blue's Clues, she hears him shrieking and comes running, only to find him laughing hysterically in a way he hasn't done since he was an infant. Then Sunny knows she made the right decision.
- Only Known by Their Nickname: Bubber's real name is Robert, but no one uses it.
- Self-Harm: Bubber wears a helmet due to his tendency to violently head bang.
- Siblings Wanted: Sunny is pregnant with her second child partly because she didn't like growing up as an only child.
- Their First Time: Before Maxon went off to college, Sunny led him into a wooded area, where she showed him how to have sex. After that, she had sex with other men during her early adulthood, but Maxon never had sex again until he and Sunny got married.
- Trash of the Titans: Maxon's father Paul was a hoarder whose house, barn, and garage were all filled to the rafters with things he thought he might need.
