REVIEW: "The Sunshine Girls" by Molly Fader
My mother grew up in a sufficient but far from luxurious house in an industrial swath of Pennsylvania near Pittsburgh. Her home sat on a single street of similarly near-squalid residences sandwiched between the railroad tracks and the Allegheny river.
As my mom tells it, one day, when she was playing in the stone driveway, she picked up a heap of gravel in her chubby toddler fist and thrusted it towards my grandfather — a man I have never met but suspect I would like. She told him, with the confidence only possessed by the very young and the very intoxicated, that what she had given him wasn't driveway gravel but, instead, magic rocks.
They would keep him safe, she asserted.
They were lucky.
So he took them. And, instead of dropping them back onto the driveway once her attention had been diverted to another task, he slipped them into his pocket.
He would carry them in his pocket for the rest of his life, hauling them to church in his Sunday best and keeping them on his hip as he worked in a chemical factory just down the same river on which their home rested.
When he died, my mother found them on his bedside table, now shiny and smooth as a result of the decades they spent tumbling around in his pockets, keeping him safe.
I think of this story every time I open my jewelry box and look at my very own small stack of these stones that my mother gave to me the night before I went off to college. I thought of these stones — or, more specifically, the value that we assign to things that are inarguably not valuable — as I read The Sunshine Girls by Molly Fader.
It’s 1967 when BettyKay leaves behind her small town and ventures off to college to train to become a nurse. While most people — and maybe even BettyKay herself, if she is being honest — assume that she is simply passing time until she settles down with her sweetheart, the passion she feels for nursing and the turbulence of the era change BettyKay’s trajectory entirely. Also impacting her plans and inevitably her future is her roommate, Kitty.
While BettyKay is quiet and calm and focused, Kitty is anything but. She’s flirtatious in a way that BettyKay would never dare be and exudes a confidence that anyone would envy.
Though these two girls could not be more different, their bond continues to grow and they start to depend on each other in ways they never would have anticipated.
Fifty years later, as BettyKay’s daughters try to come to terms with the recent, unexpected loss of their mother, they are interrupted in their grief by the arrival of Kitty.
Of all of the people that daughters Clara and Abbie expected to walk through the church doors at their mother’s funeral, Hollywood starlet Kitty Devereaux was not one of them. BettyKay’s daughters, like pretty much everyone else in Greensboro, Iowa, had no idea that BettyKay shared a past with this famous face.
This revelation leaves Clara and Abbie wondering how they were so unaware of the existence of this critical relationship within their mother’s life. Unfortunately for them, the only person that has the answers is Kitty, and she seems less-than-eager to share them.
To call The Sunshine Girls unputdownable would be an understatement.
Written in dual-timeline format, this novel effectively, and all but immediately, drew readers into the lives of these characters.
This success was due in large part to the strength of Fader’s characters. All of them were well-developed, realistic, and dynamic. Despite their differences and flaws, there was something about each of the central characters that was endearing and engaging.
Another factor that had a significant impact on the successfulness of this novel was Fader’s ability to craft an engrossing setting.
The late 1960s was simple in that we lacked the technologies that leave us feeling overly exposed to content and inundated with information. At the same time it was complicated in that everything was changing, the youth was pulling away from the establishment, and the entire landscape of America was evolving. Fader captured this cultural asynchronicity incredibly well.
While I can articulate these strengths, there really isn’t any way to capture how enigmatically engrossing this novel was. It was just one of those rare books that captures your heart and your attention from start to finish.
Historical fiction in general has this magical way of making us feel connected to our pasts and, in doing that, deepens our understanding of our future.
As I blazed through the pages of this novel, I thought constantly of my own mother. Looking at my now 73-year-old mom, it’s hard to believe that she was ever once a precocious tot who truly believed that a fist full of driveway gravel could be magical. It’s equally hard to believe that she, a woman also named Betty, headed off on her own college adventure, also in 1967, and that the things that happened to her — the choices she made before I was even a thought in her mind — had just as much of an impact on my life as the choices BettyKay made had on her daughters, Clara and Abbie.
Lovers of dual-timeline historical fiction in particular will delight in this absolute success of a novel. It is an easy 5 out of 5 cocktails.
Do you ever wish you lived in an earlier, simpler, era? I’ve wrestled with this question many times and I still don’t think I have an answer — not that the opportunity will present itself. Tell me what you think in the comments!
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*I was provided a gifted copy of this title by the publisher*
