Sleep deprivation is a powerful form of torture. When Thea Goodman's The Sunshine When She's Gone introduces us to new parents Veronica and John, they haven't slept through the night in six months, let alone had a date night. Veronica has become a desirable yet distant woman with a wad of tissues up her nose; John is a neglected husband trying hard to gain a morsel of his wife's attention. Clara, their blessed baby girl, has massively tanked their social life, but as we enter this family scene, Clara has done the unthinkable--she has finally slept through the night.
Things get sticky pretty quickly after that, though. John, intending to let his exhausted wife sleep in, sets out with Clara to a diner right around the corner in Manhattan but winds up taking her to the Caribbean for the weekend by accident. (Yes, that happens.) How will the hypervigilant Veronica react when she finds out, and what will she do in their absence? She goes wild, it turns out, but not in the way one might expect.
Goodman's tale seems to suggest that obsessive parenting will drive any person bonkers. There's a loss of identity and independence when one becomes a parent, and Goodman has her characters reclaim themselves as individuals in one transformative weekend. The Sunshine When She's Gone is a fresh breath of fiction with rich characters and an engrossing plot, in which Goodman makes the drudgery of new parenting seem utterly exciting. --Natalie Papailiou, author of blog MILF: Mother I'd Like to Friend