This book was great i really enjoyed it.

Surprisingly good - heart-achingly captures the poor rural America we so often overlook or caricature. I love that we meet the characters as characters first and it's only slowly through the novel that we come to realize that almost all of the characters come from deeply impoverished and troubled backgrounds, aka "white trash" as another character calls them (and the book does a good job of making you squirm a little bit at that, without preaching). Only weak point was at the very end - everything wrapped up a little too neatly and cleanly to be entirely believable for an otherwise surprisingly nuanced book.

Absolute perfection.

This book approaches Literature, too good to be classified using the Teen label. It reads like the little sister of Elizabeth Berg's book, "True to Form." The writing is not quite as mature, but it is lyrical and has a depth to it that surprised me. HIghly recommended.

This book was amazing. I couldn't put it down till I was done reading it. I love Lauren Myracle and most of her other books but this book is by far the best one she has written to date. Hope all her books after this one are this good

This book is very powerful and realistic. The characters are so raw and feel so real that you just get hooked into the story. I couldn't get enough of this book and couldn't put it down until I was finished. Lauren Myracle's prose is beautiful and this is much different from her other works. It was surprising even! I think the only flaw would be the set following of a mystery, but the rest of the book was so amazing that it could be overlooked. Truly beautiful, I would say it's up there with To Kill A Mockingbird.

From the moment I read the opening newspaper article to when I read the final page, Lauren Myracle's Shine pulled me in. It was a truly spell-binding read--one that I put off for far to long. I know I won't be the first to say that some of Myracle's other popular novels don't hold a lot of appeal to me--not that they're not probably fantastic reads, just not my type. I guess it just goes to show Myracle's diversity as a writer because Shine was my "type" of book. From the start, I felt completely sucked into the atmosphere the author creates. The bigotry was so indicative of the small-mindedness that is often engendered in that setting. I could connect so well to the characters that I felt stifled right along with them - stuck in a world where my ideas didn't fit in. All the characters in this novel were really well-done. They were so dynamic and did things that you didn't expect. It was truly refreshing. It made every turn of the page a new adventure because the characters could turn out to be or do something different than you expected at every turn. This is truly a fabulous read. I want nothing more than to own a finished copy of this one so I can read it over and over again.