This is meant to be a feel-good book. And it has achieved its purpose: laughter and tears coexist in the fast-moving yet simple narrative. It is a family story where family bonds stretch and break, and ultimately tighten. The plot hinges around the main protagonist, the mother, Ronni Sunshine, narcissistic, self-absorbed and charismatic, who in her headlong flight to make it big in Hollywood, has alienated her three daughters.
In addition, in her own way, she has also managed to widen the rift between her three daughters. They are, in turn, adoring and angry at the indifferent parenting, and the need for constant attention and hateful manner of getting these strokes them, and all feel the repercussion of the parenting in different ways.
Nell, the oldest of the trio, has taken refuge in a farm to escape her mother’s domineering ways, where she has brought up her child (the result of an unwise affair) in her own way. Meredith, the middle one, is never good enough or pretty enough or slim enough for her mother to accept her. She is the one who takes care of things and cleans up other people’s messes. And so, in London, she gets entangled with a man whom she may not even love. She settles for him because he has made a concerted play for her and that has made Meredith, a people pleaser, grateful that someone that handsome would not just notice her but propose! And Lizzy, the youngest and the one most like her mother, uses her drive to find a culinary career by ignoring the crumbling of her own marriage.
And yet, having grown up in the shadow of their mother’s constant criticism, they still yearn for her approval, and they each fashion their own survival skills. For example, Nell would “just inside the front door to try to sniff out their mother’s mood, try to figure out who they need to be at their particular moment, in order to appease and not let her wrath decimate them.”
And so, Ronni, the self-centred mother, continues her merry way, until things change for all three of them, and of course, for Ronni. Often in such stories the direction of some events become predictable. Everyone gets their way. But Greene has introduced a twist in the tale.
Ronni drops a bombshell by announcing that she has ALS and wants her daughters to come back home and help her take her own life. Why does she want to do this? Presumably, she wants to make amends for the way she has treated her daughters. Also mixed up with these emotions is a fervent wish to see them reunited, family-wise. She wants them to be the way she wants them to be, to bond and to lean on each other when there is a necessity. As she writes to a friend, “I am hopeful that I will gently and quietly expire, having put my affairs in order and said my goodbyes.”
There seems to be a bit of discrepancy in the turn of events. The transition from a narcissistic, selfish mother who has never spared a moment for her children (who were brought up by a succession of nannies) suddenly feels remorse and wants to atone for her shortcomings as a parent. Miraculously, she is given this heaven-sent opportunity — the prospect of death.
And she seizes this opportunity to inveigle her daughters into her home and get their cooperation to participate in her ending her life, and hopes in the process, they would somehow come together and thus send her peacefully to her death. And so, like an adult fairy tale, all the threads end up getting neatly beribboned and packaged. Somehow, it seems a little contrived. The author is apparently one of the founders of the so-called ‘chick lit’, which has got both admirers and detractors. And this book, more than others, seems to fit right into literature for chicks. Written by women, and for women, this increasingly popular genre has been defended by women the likes of Gloria Steinem.
This latest offering by Jane Green caters to that type of literature — warm and fuzzy, with a heroine-centred narrative. The mission of this book seems to be to explore the development in both mother and daughters. Each of them finds the strength to recognise what they want from their lives, what they know they deserve, and what is their right. Every woman will recognise some characteristics of themselves in the sisters. And in recognising that, they also heal.
The Sunshine Sisters
Jane Green
Pan Macmillan
2017, pp 384
Rs 331
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