Luminous
Silvia Park
Hardcover / eBook
ISBN: 9781668021668
Simon and Schuster, March 2025, 400 pages

Greetings, readers, and welcome back to another book review! This month we’re diving into a brilliantly constructed labyrinth of love, loss, free will, and forced fulfillment in Silvia Park’s Luminous, a story with more angles than a non-Euclidean triangle.

It’s difficult to know where to begin in describing Luminous, because it is ostensibly about a near-future unified Korea where robots are ubiquitous, as well as a suspenseful detective thriller, as well as a sunset summer coming of age story, as well as a heart wrenching treatise on transitioning and transient family bonds. The miraculous part is that Park weaves all of these threads together into a debut novel that reads like someone who has been writing for hundreds of years. At times, I felt like I was reading William Gibson. At others, I felt like I was reading N.K. Jemisin, then Paolo Bacigalupi, then Stephen King, and ultimately, I realized I was reading the voice of someone who knew exactly the story they wanted to tell and executed that vision flawlessly.

Luminous is told mainly from the perspective of Ruijie, a twelve year old wasting away from a necrotizing disease that requires her to use robotic assistance to approach having the normal life she desperately desires; Cho Jun, a recovering war veteran and detective for Robot Crimes still plagued with a conscience; and Morgan, Jun’s lonely sister and one of the lead programmers for Imagine Friends, the premier robot companion manufacturer for all of Korea. What starts as an unconnected series of windows into the everyday life of a nation struggling with the wounds of reunification swiftly morphs into a sprawling meditation on the meaning of self from a variety of viewpoints.

The first thing that struck me while reading Luminous was the prose. This is a book filled with beautifully heart-wrenching, daggerlike sentences slipping effortlessly into your heart and mind. Park wields their words like a scalpel, careful and incisive in a way where you don’t feel the cut until several seconds later. There were multiple parts where I laughed out loud, and multiple others where I felt myself breaking inside from the sheer humanity and pathos on display. Purely from a technical standpoint, Luminous is a work of art, and as a writer I was humbled and inspired by how magnificently the craft was executed.

However, there is so much more to Luminous than just the prose. Park also crafts a ridiculously compelling narrative filled with rich character growth and worldbuilding, so much so that I was legitimately disappointed when the book ended because I wanted it to keep going forever. I could spend hours wandering the hot and dusty streets of Yongsan and Hannam and others, lose myself for days in the slowly dying people trying to build something new with the silicon and skyn (synthetic skin) gradually replacing them, stare up into a rain-clouded sky and wonder where reality ends and begins. There is terror and anger and hate in Luminous, those terribly human feelings we all suffer from, but they’re ultimately overwhelmed by the pure expression of wonder and awe oozing from every pore, human and synthetic alike, an expression that, to borrow a phrase from Terry Pratchett, perfectly evokes where the falling angel meets the rising ape.

This is a book that should win awards, and it is a book that will win awards, because Park has written something awe-inspiring, in every sense of the word. I can perfectly picture the future they envision, in all its beauty and ugliness, and it is an entirely human world filled with our non-human children we lurch closer to creating every day. Luminous is grotesque, it is triumphant, it is horrifying, it is transcendent, and you really, really should read it. Take the time to soak in everything it offers, then go back and read it again. It really is that good.