Review: The Luminaries

The Luminaries by Susan Dennard
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

While we await the long-developing conclusion to Dennard's signature work in The Witchlands, here she brings us readers a smaller piece of more modern fantasy, based on the "Sooz Your Own Adventure" (as she called it) games she entertained readers with on Twitter a few years back. It's not an exact match to how the story went based on Twitter polls, but then again, I barely remember most of what went down in those polls anyway. What I do remember, though, is feeling the whole time like Dennard had every intention of writing The Luminaries into an actual book, and now the time has come for her to present this book, the first in a series if the loose ends at the conclusion are anything to go by. I've seen other reviews that say this book feels like a throwback to 2000s or early 2010s YA, and to an extent, those reviews are pretty well correct. It's a relatively short book set in a small town where there's a lot of fantastic mystery around every corner, and the protagonist is a misfit in this town because her father went bad and now everyone else, especially outside her clan, thinks it's open season to subject her to perpetual Mean Girls kind of crap. Everyone, that is, except for the stereotypical bad boy with a heart of gold, who constantly smells of cigarettes and weed, but was the leading lady's old friend so that's the source of their tension. So yeah, Dennard gets pretty tropey in this one, but it's still a zippy little read, easily done in a single sitting (Marie Lu certainly wasn't wrong about that in her blurb.) And yeah, those loose ends really do make me want to keep going and read the inevitable sequel. Hopefully, though, Dennard finishes The Witchlands first...

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