RESURRECTING SUNSHINE

A teenager longs for his dead girlfriend.

It’s been one year since Adam’s girlfriend, Marybeth, died in a freak drowning accident. Adam doesn’t mourn alone. Marybeth was known to the world as “Sunshine,” a singer/songwriter who touched the world with her melodies. Adam was her guitarist, joining Sunshine on stage and becoming famous as well, but that fame can’t help him cope with his loss. When a mysterious agency shows up on Adam’s doorstep offering to clone Sunshine and bring her back from the dead, Adam can’t resist helping them reconstruct her memories. Adam soon finds himself on a mysterious Pacific island, surrounded by scientists all day and hanging out with a strange, young woman named Genevieve by night. The unfolding story has a repetitive nature: Adam enters a memory, has reservations, is reassured, repeat. There’s a large valley in the middle where very little happens. As Adam helps rebuild Sunshine’s memories, readers get peeks into the couple’s troubled past, but there’s not much to surprise them in it. The quandary surrounding cloning is poked at here and there, but the conclusion feels inevitable, and readers will get antsy as the author slowly marches toward it. The primary cast seems to be a largely white one.

An overlong and under-thought sci-fi exercise