Luminous

I enjoyed Luminous. Mara Rutherford's writing style is very readable, and that made it easy to keep reading...and reading...and reading long past my bedtime.

The story is engaging – a young woman who's long been kept hidden away from the world for fear of a powerful warlock discovering her power, the young man she loves who has secrets of his own, the powerful warlock himself (who may not be as he appears).

Liora and her family fled the king's court for the small village of Sylvan after her mother's death. Liora's father feared that Lord Darius, a warlock with his own nefarious agenda, would discover Liora's magic and take her away. When she leaves the house (seldom), Liora has to keep her radiant skin covered up. But Darius does discover Liora's magic, and instead of demanding her, he takes her younger sister Mina as collateral. Thus begins the quest to save Mina. Liora must go into the king's court, where Darius holds sway, and even into the heart of darkness itself, to wrest Mina from Darius's clutches. In the process, she learns about the true power of her magic, and why Darius has been seeking it, and realizes that perhaps she isn't the monster she'd always feared herself to be.

The story is perhaps a little simplistic. There are no detailed descriptions of the magic system or how it works. Some people have magic, some don't. Something has to activate the magic. But Rutherford's writing makes it work. She does a marvelous job of drawing pictures with her words, and those pictures kept me scrolling through the book, wanting to know what happened next. And her characters aren't simplistic. There is more to most all of them than how they first appear. (With the exception of Luc, perhaps. He was just a troll. Figuratively. There are no actual trolls in the book.)

I was particularly intrigued with the project Margana had been working on for Darius for twenty years, the tapestry of darkness. It was a thing – a tapestry. And yet it was like a Tardis, bigger on the inside. Way, WAY bigger. What a thing to conceive of!

Liora's power calls to mind that of Penn in L. J. Hatton's Sing Down the Stars. If you enjoyed that story, you may also like Luminous.

Thank you to NetGalley and Inkyard Press for an advance reader copy! All opinions here are mine, and I don't say nice things about books that I don't actually like.