The Sunshine Girls by Molly Fader

A special thank you to Graydon House for a finished copy in exchange for an honest review.

Two friends. A lifetime of secrets. One sparkling story.

1967 Iowa. Nursing school roommates BettyKay and Kitty don’t have much in common. A farmer’s daughter, BettyKay has risked her family’s disapproval to make her dreams come true away from her small rural town. Cosmopolitan Kitty has always relied on her beauty and smarts to get by and to hide a devastating secret from the past that she can’t seem to outrun. Yet the two share a determination to prove themselves in a changing world, forging an unlikely, powerful bond on a campus unkind to women.

Before their first year is up, tragedy strikes, and the women’s paths are forced apart. But against all odds, a decades-long friendship forms, persevering through love, marriage, failure and death, from the jungles of Vietnam to the glamorous circles of Hollywood. Until one snowy night leads their relationship to the ultimate crossroads.

Fifty years later, two estranged sisters are shocked when a famous movie star shows up at their mother’s funeral. Over one tumultuous weekend, the women must reckon with a dazzling truth about their family that will alter their lives forever…

Told from the perspectives of Clara, BettyKay, and Abbie, and with alternating timelines, The Sunshine Girls is about the power of female relationships. Strong women are what elevate the story.

Fader also employs an epistolary style narrative with the inclusion of the torn out pages from BettyKay’s diaries. These missing passages not only provide context, but they offer insight to the societal expectations of the time. The women were confined with their limited choices and by the men in their lives—Hugh, Dr. Fischer, Rex, and Jenny’s father, Roy.

Kitty, Jenny, and BettyKay have difficult relationships with their parents. It is these fractured relationships that not only shape their lives, but strengthen their bonds—they are sustained by their friendship.  

With its instant hook, compelling characters, well-kept secrets, and a little bit of old Hollywood glamour, The Sunshine Girls is a captivating and enlightening read that’s a perfect book club choice. 

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MOLLY FADER is an award-winning author of more than 40 romance novels under the pennames Molly O'Keefe and M. O'Keefe. The McAvoy Sisters Book of Secrets was her first women's fiction novel.

Fader resides in Toronto with her family.

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Q & A with Molly Fader*

GWR: You also write contemporary romance and erotic romance (under M. O’Keefe and Molly O’Keefe) in addition to book club fiction. Do you approach each novel the same way or does it vary depending on the genre?

MF: My approach to writing every book is pretty much the same. An idea grabs a hold of me and I ask myself a bunch of questions about the people in the idea and what those people want and what they need and the secrets they might be keeping. When I’m writing a romance—these questions are really focused on the relationship between the two people falling in love. I think about sex quite a bit :) and ask myself what sex means to them and how can I make that more interesting/compelling/moving. 

Book club fiction opens up the questions. I get to think about the secrets mothers keep from daughters and how siblings have different experiences with the same parent and how the effects of the choices people make can rattle through families.  I also like exploring the  recent past in book club fiction. The Sunshine Girls takes place in the 1960’s-1980’s and now and the research into that era was fascinating. 

GWR: How did you come up with the title? Were there actually “Sunshine Girls”?

MF: Ha—well, there were Sunshine Girls, but it was my T-Ball team as a kid!!!  I was thinking of the candy stripers—girls who volunteered in hospitals and wore striped uniforms. It’s kind of a too sweet name for pretty difficult job. I liked the idea of these first year nurses having a name like that—something slightly misleading and bright in contrast to the occasional darkness of the job. 

GWR: What was the inspiration for the novel and how did you decide at which point to start the story? 

MF: Amazingly, the beginning of the novel—with two estranged sister’s at their mother’s small town funeral and in walks none other than stage and screen icon—Kitty Devereaux to tell them they didn’t really know their mother at all. That scene came to me in a dream. And that actually happens a lot but I never remember the dream or I try and write it down and it’s just gibberish. But that scene stuck with me—and so I started to ask my questions. Why are the sister’s estranged? How would Kitty Devereaux meet a small town, Iowa nurse? Why was she kept a secret? And those questions led me directly to my mom’s experience in nursing school in the 1960’s. 

I can’t imagine I’m going to have an experience like that again. It was really magical and fun. The story felt like it was waiting for at every turn. 

GWR: Can you tell us about the research you did?

MF: Some of the events in the past time line are lifted directly from my mother’s experience. She and my aunt were an absolute treasure trove of historical and medical details. I went down a rabbit hole of women’s reproductive rights from early pregnancy tests  and ultra sounds to abortion procedures. There have been some amazing books published by women who served as nurses in Vietnam—those books were utterly invaluable. 

GWR: Give your best Hollywood pitch for the book and who would you cast?

MF: The Sunshine Girls is about two sisters who realize their mother isn't who they'd always thought when a legendary movie star shows up at her funeral, unraveling the sweeping story of a friendship that begins at a nursing school in Iowa in 1965 and onward as it survives decades of change, war, fame-and the secrets they kept for each other.

Oh, this is an endlessly fun game. A lot of readers have come to me with really surprising choices! 

I always saw the sisters as Aidy Bryant and Kate McKinnon—I think the two of them could really bring out some of the humour in their storyline. 

BettyKay and Kitty are tricky because the timeline is over so many years.  Obviously, I thought about Reese Witherspoon for Kitty. Or Nicole Kidman. Those two women have a lot of star power. 

I love the actress Melanie Lynskey for BettyKay.  Or Amy Adams would be great too. 

GWR: Why did you decide to write The Sunshine Girls from multiple and generational points of view? 

MF: I’ve been wanting to do a dual timeline book for a while. I love reading them and I was just waiting for the right kind of story to come together. And Kitty Devereaux walked into the funeral and gave me that story. I was really interested in making the Hollywood Legend come from surprising origins.

GWR: Female relationships—mother and daughter, sisters, friends—are paramount to all of your contemporary fiction novels (The McAvoy Sisters Book of Secrets, The Bitter and Sweet of Cherry Season, The Sunshine Girls). What other authors are especially good on writing these types of relationships?

MF: Oh gosh—SO MANY.  I love Canadian author Heather O’Neill—she has an AMAZING voice and she writes nuanced female friendships so well.  Joshilyn Jackson is a hero of mine and even her new domestic suspense novels have rich and surprising female relationships. A fabulous debut this year was The Thread Collectors by Alyson Richman and Shaunna J. Edwards—a novel set during the American Civil War about two very different women. And a Canadian debut I seriously loved was Looking for Jane by Heather Marshall about the real-life underground networks organizing safe abortions before they were legal and homes for unwed mothers.

Sonali Dev’s new one—The Vibrant Years—about three generations of women all starting to date is fabulous. 

GWR: The men in the story tried to control the women in their lives and these women were also confined by their limited number of choices. Why was this important for you to write about?

MF: Well, it sprang from the time and the place. My mother told me when she choose to go to nursing school—she only had two options for employment—nursing or teaching. She chose nursing and nursing school and hospitals were a tiered system—with male doctors at the top. It was also really important to me to tell a story about how women’s reproductive rights were shrouded in lack of information. We all know the 60’s and 70’s were a time of huge social change for women and I wanted to write a very personal story about what that looked like. 

GWR: If your book was a beverage, what would it be? 

MF: Oh, my mom’s lemonade for sure. Tart, sweet, icy cold. Refreshing and comforting at the same time.

GWR: What are you working on now?

MF: I am working on a super fun book set in the early 80’s NYC. It features Studio 54, some female vigilantes, and two sisters trying to find out the truth about their mother. 

*A version of this post was published on STYLE Canada.

In the Upper Country by Kai Thomas

A special thank you to the publisher, Penguin Random House Canada, for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

In the 1800s in Dunmore, a Canadian town settled by people fleeing enslavement in the American south, young Lensinda Martin works for a crusading Black journalist.

One night, a neighboring farmer summons Lensinda after a slave hunter is shot dead on his land by an old woman who recently arrived via the Underground Railroad. When the old woman refuses to flee before the authorities arrive, the farmer urges Lensinda to gather testimony from her before she can be condemned for the crime.

But the old woman doesn't want to confess. Instead she proposes a barter: a story for a story. And so begins an extraordinary exchange of tales that reveal an interwoven history of Black and Indigenous peoples in a wide swath of what is called North America.

As time runs out, Lensinda is challenged to uncover her past and face her fears in order to make good on the bargain of a story for a story. And it seems the old woman may carry a secret that could shape Lensinda's destiny.

With themes of freedom and sovereignty, family, and survival, In the Upper Country is an exceptional novel from a bold new voice. 

The story is set in the town of Dunmore—a fictitious Canadian town settled by former slaves that escaped along the Underground Railroad. It is here where Thomas gives his readers a glimpse of what life was like for these previously enslaved people as well as their connection to Indigenous people. 

This mesmerizing debut is about the fates of two resilient and unforgettable women—Lensinda and Cash—whose currency is their stories. Told from Lensinda’s perspective, Thomas amplifies women, making them strong, courageous, and unforgettable.  

In the spirit and tradition of the storytelling that preserved their cultures, In the Upper Country maps the interconnected history between white, Black, and Indigenous communities.

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KAI THOMAS is a writer, carpenter, and land steward. He is a graduate of University of Guelph’s Creative Writing MFA, for which the manuscript of In the Upper Country was his thesis work. 

Thomas resides in upstate New York.  

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Q & A with Kai Thomas*

GWR: Which writers (novelists, playwrights, journalists, poets) do you admire most and did any of them influence the way you write or inspire you to become an author?

KT:  So many. Many too many to name. I will be brutal and pick three. 

Marlon James’ novels were a significant inspiration to me. I picked up his work at a time in my life when the idea of writing a novel was just dawning on me, and the equal parts wonder and terror in his exquisite storytelling convinced me that pursuing this craft was a good idea. 

The playwright Djanet Sears deepened my relationship with theatre. Witnessing Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God was surreal for me. It was the first time I had seen such fantastic musicality, humour, humanity, and utter beauty, all enacted through the story of an Afro Canadian experience. 

Waubgeshig Rice not only is a fantastic journalist but a skilled novelist. Moreover he is a friend and a mentor to me. Together we workshopped excerpts of early drafts of my novel, and his guidance helped me truly connect with the craft, and to find joy in it.

GWR: How long did it take you to write In the Upper Country, and can you tell us a bit about your writing process?

KT: Most of the active writing and editing of this novel happened over the course of three years. I worked intensively on the manuscript during my MFA at the University of Guelph, and again once I had sold it, in coordination with my three top-notch editors: Lara Hinchberger, Laura Tisdel, and Abigail Scruby. 

Throughout the entire process, I leaned into the feedback I was getting from peers, teachers, and editors. In the Upper Country has a fairly complex plot, and having never written a novel before, I took all the help I could get. Whenever something was unnecessarily confusing to a reader, I would attend it in the text; examining it and rewriting and adding as necessary. My writing style tends toward the sparse and enigmatic, and while that sometimes lends itself to compelling prose, mostly in its raw form it is just a lot of murkiness. And while I’m getting better at self-editing, I hugely value good feedback and ideas, and I think the call and response between the readers and myself was the defining process of writing this book.  

GWR: In your own words, how would you describe the book?

KT: From a genre perspective it is a historical fiction set in late 18th to mid 19th century Great Lakes region of North America. Thematically, it grapples with Black and Indigenous relations of the period, the institutions of slavery in the US and Canada, the War of 1812, the Underground Railroad, ideas of freedom and sovereignty, human relationships with nature, and many others. Its mood is like: imagine black folk singer Rhiannon Giddens got remixed by Tribe Called Red.  

GRW: What was the genesis of the novel? What came first—the overall idea or the characters? 

KT: The idea definitely came first. I knew certain scenes and historical moments had to be represented in this story. But funnily enough, as a reader, I feel that characters are actually more important than the overall idea or themes. But by way of artistic process, it’s the themes, and sometimes even the mood that come first, and then it is up to me to let the characters animate those more abstract ideas. 

GWR: How did you balance crafting a good story against historical accuracy in terms of character development? 

KT: The particular style of historical fiction that I’m working with in this book is a type of realism. So historical accuracy was quite important. I aimed to build a world that was parallel to the one I found in history books. All of the occurrences in the novel are things that could have happened, or at the very least, stories that could have been told. That is to say, once this type of parallel universe setting is established, then the historical accuracy lends itself to the quality of the story, which of course includes character development.

GWR: I love the idea of stories being used as the currency between Cash and Lensinda. Can you tell us about the research you did to form these narratives?

KT: Much of the research began with reading really interesting historical monographs that dealt with the book’s areas of interest. I searched the bibliographies of these books for pertinent primary source documents. So called “slave narratives” were among those, but additionally, recipe books, marine muster rolls, town census records, court records, and newspaper articles of the place and time. Additionally I spoke with elders, historians, and knowledge keepers who had invaluable perspectives on the pertinent historical periods and themes.  

GWR: In the Upper Country is written from Lensinda’s perspective. Why was it important for you to amplify women’s stories?

KT: When I started writing, I didn’t know Lensinda was going to be the narrator and protagonist. She just kind of demanded that space. I think her character was hollering at me from between the lines of the history books, so I just tried to listen. Initially I found it difficult to write her voice, and I think the difficulty appealed to me. It signalled that I had no idea what a young black Canadian woman would sound like in 1859. And I wanted to know. And I probably wasn’t the only one.   

GWR: What do you hope readers will take away from your book?

KT: I hope they take away a fresh perspective on a period of history that they may have had stale associations with. Whether that be interests of Black and Indigenous peoples in the War of 1812, or the complex lives of Underground Railroad communities in the “promised land”, or that of humanity’s relationship with nature as a vehicle for sovereignty.                            

GWR: What are you working on now?

KT: I work full time as a carpenter site manager at Soul Fire Farm, a non-profit educational farm in upstate New York. I also have a lovely family, and I spend good chunks of time caregiving our one year old and preparing for baby #2 in who arrives in February if all goes well. My writing time these days is mostly occupied with this sort of thing, associated with the launch of In the Upper Country. In terms of my next creative writing project, I’m in the beginning stages of the next novel: a deep dive into the beauty and terror of Trinidadian folklore, set against the backdrop of a 19th century pirate fiction. 

*A version of this post was published on STYLE Canada.