Hello, Sunshine

By: Laura Dave

Narrated by: Joy Osmanski

Length: 7 hrs and 42 mins

Publisher's summary

From Laura Dave - the author of the "addictive" (Us Weekly), "winning" (Publishers Weekly), and critically acclaimed best seller Eight Hundred Grapes - comes a new novel about the secrets we keep...even from ourselves.

Sunshine Mackenzie truly is living the dream. A lifestyle guru for the modern age, Sunshine is beloved by millions of people who tune in to her YouTube cooking show, and millions more scour her website for recipes, wisdom, and her enticing suggestions for how to curate a perfect life. She boasts a series of New York Times best-selling cookbooks, a devoted architect husband, and a reputation for sincerity and kindness - Sunshine seems to have it all.

But she's hiding who she really is. And when her secret is revealed, her fall from grace is catastrophic. What Sunshine does in the ashes of destruction will save her in more ways than she can imagine.

In our modern world, where celebrity is a careful construct, Laura Dave's compelling, enticing novel explores the devastating effect of the secrets we keep in public...and in private. Hello, Sunshine is a fresh, provocative look at a woman teetering between a scrupulously assembled life and the redemptive power of revealing the truth.

©2017 Laura Dave (P)2017 Simon & Schuster

Review

I wish it would have had closure and more final. It just seemed choppy and incomplete.

Sunshine

This book for me was interesting. It does a pretty good job of bringing self awareness of the main character (Sunshine) and how social media distorts ourselves to ourselves. How fudging a bit here and there starts to become true to ourselves when it truly isn’t ourself. I know that is a confusing statement but so is how social
Media has distorted us! How many followers do I have….did they like my post….

Characters to Hate and Not Much Sunshine

Difficult to stick with a book featuring phony, chronic liars without much of a moral compass, doing hateful things to each other. The perfirmance was the only really goid thing about the book.

It left me wanting.

It left me wanting an ending instead of uncertainty, but it left you where life tends to leave us all on uncertain terms.

Cute, but just okay.

I didn’t care for the presenter’s male voices at all. The story was cute
but predictable.

Not sure why

Was it to soap opera for me. But couldn't finish.
I don't care about her demise. Maybe bc I know the main character is goingf downhill I didn't want to take the ride.

Joy Osmanski was really good.

As good as Joy Osmanski was, she could not help the light weight story. The characters we not well fleshed out. Maybe a bit more back story would have helped.

A compelling look into lies and truths

Hello Sunshine. My fourth endeavour on the quest to read through Laura Dave’s books… a quest I’m not sure why I’ve continued, when so far I’ve felt her books were ok but not great (The Last Thing He Told Me), infuriatingly bad (London is the Best City in America), and irritating but with a semi-satisfying ending (800 Grapes). Still, there is something about Dave’s character work that makes me want to find that one piece from her that I’ll love… and so I vowed continue, until I’ve finished everything she has out there. Perhaps that makes me a terrible reader, but I’ve never been good at leaving a project unfinished. So here we are, at Hello Sunshine. Here I am, more than halfway through this quest. Mild spoilers ahead.

Hello Sunshine was much, much better than London or 800 Grapes. Much better. I’m fairly certain this is because it was Dave’s sixth release – making it her second-latest book (Last Thing is the most recent). She’s more developed as a writer here than she was for either London or 800 Grapes, and it shows. Is she still sometimes tempted to repeat herself (both within books and book to book)? Yes. Is she sometimes too prone to telling over showing? Yes. But both these flaws are less pronounced here than they are in her earlier works.

Even better? The protagonist is not horrible. Well, okay – she is horrible. That’s actually her most defining characteristic when the book takes off. But, she acknowledges that she’s horrible (first facially, and eventually for real) and the reader is clearly not supposed to feel she isn’t. The story is, in many ways, about her being a horrible, terrible person and learning what it means to come to terms with that. She’s a fraud who has built a career on lies – at first not realising just how far it would go, but always with the knowledge that it was a lie. After a decade, that web she’s woven – and which has been woven for her by others – is crumbling around her: the bill has come due. She must face that everyone thinks she’s a terrible person, that she has become a terrible person, and that perhaps it doesn’t really matter who blew up her life, because ultimately, it was she who made it possible. (Side note – this was good that it didn’t really matter to me, because while it shocks Sunny when she finally figures it out, I guessed this twist from Chapter 1. I like to think – though perhaps its giving Dave extra credit – that the audience was meant to realise this quickly, and that it was part of Sunny’s story that it took her so long to see it.)

So why do I say she’s not horrible? Because she isn’t horrible to read – something that I think early Dave books really struggle to deliver on. We know we’re in the head of a jerk, but we’re meant to. And we get to watch her go through actual character development – something that was glaringly absent from London and 800 Grapes, and not exactly centre-stage in the newly released Last Thing. And the result? Despite my scruples, my past disappointment and my trepidation, I actually really, really enjoyed this read.

Sunny was delightful, even for all her flaws. Rain, her older sister who has never left Montauk, much to Sunny’s frustration, was a little underdeveloped… but what we got of her was interesting and added to the story. Her daughter, little Sammy, was perhaps the best character in the book. Even Sunny’s various bosses (old life and new), Ethan (the local fisherman who could have been a love interest but who Dave shockingly, and perfectly, does not turn into one), and her faux foe are good characters in this book. And then there’s Danny – another good character, though also a terrible person in his own way.

Like The Last Thing, one of the things I liked best about this book was the ending – it’s not perfect, it’s not neat, and the reader is left to decide for themselves exactly how Sunny’s future turns out. But for Sunny, it’s a start.

Overall, a solid effort, and my favourite of Dave’s thus far.

enjoyable book.

I enjoyed following Sunshine through her struggles as her life unravelled. She learned a lot about herself and honesty. The conclusion of the book left room for speculation rather than a neat conclusion which was more satisfying. Narrator did a wonderful job of bringing the characters to life.

Very enjoyable!

I wasn’t sure what to expect following the ‘preview’. I throughly enjoyed. The narration was excellent and added to my enjoyment of the story.