Radiance

Huh...
This is a difficult book to review. It's a difficult book to read, jumping between genres as quickly as the characters jump between planets and times. I do a lot of my reading in the little waiting spots of life, during commercial breaks or in restaurants. I couldn't really do that with this book as it required all of my attention to keep pace with what was going on and even giving it all my attention didn't guarantee I was going to understand anything.

The book is billed as a modern take on sci-fi classics where the whole solar system is habitable and mankind sprawls across it the way we so often do when we find some extra room and consequences be damned. It's also about movies, set in a future where Edison hung on to talking film patents thus never really graduating us from silent films and the style they embodied. There's a found girl lost and a lost boy found. There's murder, drugs, and all that jazz. More than anything, I feel like it's about Story and humans' persistance in writing ourselves in as the stars without fully understanding the plot.

At first, I felt the tropes were gimmicky and hard to follow, but as I kept reading, I found myself enjoying it more, trying to put the pieces together. There's a Rashamon element of hearing the same story again and again, not just from a different perspective but through a different lens (see what I did there?). Valente really understands what it's like to be on camera, and she casts her story with characters who are always on camera, even in their most unguarded moments, always posing, always quipping, always trying to make something that is both real and right.

I'd recommend the book if you like mysteries, David Lynch films, and golden age sci-fi. Also if you have time on your hands to sit and devote to the story.