The Sunshine Girls
When legendary movie star Kitty Devereaux appears in Greensboro, Iowa, at the funeral of small-town nurse BettyKay Beecher, she shocks not only the close-knit community but also BettyKay’s daughters, Clara and Abbie. If BettyKay had known a famous movie star, why wouldn’t she have told her daughters? BettyKay is not the only one with closely-guarded secrets, though. Not as close as they once were, Clara and Abbie fight more than they confide in one another, even as they struggle with their mother’s death. As the three women grieve, Kitty tells her story, from a friendship forged in the 1960s at a Midwest nursing school to a testing of that friendship amid the drug-fueled parties of 1970s Los Angeles, from a divergence—as Kitty finds fame behind the cameras and BettyKay finds satisfaction in the Army Nurse Corps—to a shared secret that binds them across the miles. While Clara and Abbie learn more about their mother’s history, their growing relationship to Kitty gives them room to mend their own estrangement.
Fader has packed a lot of heart and history in this novel. From small-town Iowa to the big lights of Hollywood and the battlefield hospitals of Vietnam, Fader explores the tumultuous Sixties and Seventies through the friendship of two strong yet dissimilar women standing firm against the era’s challenges. Clara and Abbie are as fully realized, grappling with their own fragile secrets and fraught relationships in the present. With narrative alternating between the past and the present, interspersed with BettyKay’s diary entries, The Sunshine Girls is a satisfying story of friendship, family, and the lengths we’d go to in order to preserve them both.
