TITLE: Radiant (Towers Trilogy #1)
AUTHOR: Karina Sumner-Smith
GENRE: Young Adult Fantasy
PUBLISHED: 30/09/2014
RATING: ★★★★★
PURCHASE LINKS: Amazon
MOBILISM LINK: N/A
Review: Once upon a time in Religious Studies, our teacher offered us a philosophical problem: Is a utopia fuelled by the suffering of one person an acceptable societal system, or not? If we care only about the greater good – the good for the largest number of people possible – then is it alright to allow (or cause) a minimum of people to suffer for the benefit of the larger group?
At it’s core, that’s the question Radiant asks.
Xhea lives in a post-apocalyptic world that runs on magic – not only has magic replaced electricity as power and oil as fuel, it’s even taken the place of (monetary) currency. Not a good world to live in when you have no magic at all, such as Xhea. What Xhea does have is the ability to hear and speak to ghosts, and detach the 'tethers' that keep them bound to the living. Her skill allows her to get by, but it's no kind of luxury - nothing like the lives of the Tower dwellers, the men and women who inhabit the floating towers above the ruins of the Lower City. In the Towers, all is provided; in the Lower City, it's all too easy to starve to death, if one of the skyscraper gangs don't get you first.
Or one of the monsters that roam at night.
Radiant had a number of points against it before I ever picked it up: I am no fan of apocalyptic or dystopian stories, and this book manages to be both; I am sick to death (pun intended) of characters who can see ghosts; and I was 100% certain that there was going to be an annoying romance, possibly even a love triangle, jumping out at me within the first few chapters, a staple of this genre. But I'd seen a few positive pre-publication reviews, so when it became available I downloaded a sample to my Kindle.
And, approximately five minutes later, bought the entire book.
I have no idea whether true, but I suspect Radiant's author has never read a YA novel, because she has completely ignored the 'fundamental' tropes of the YA fantasy genre. The strongest premise for this theory is that Radiant not only has no love triangle, it has no romance at all. At all. Anyone who reads YA fantasy will know how amazingly rare that is - I'm racking my brains and still can't think of another example out of the hundreds of YA fantasies I've read in the last few years. Not, of course, that there's anything wrong with romance, but it was wonderfully refreshing to have a change of pace.
My second premise is the fact that Radiant's most important relationship is the friendship between Xhea and Shai. Both girls.
Let that sink in for a minute. In a genre that almost entirely ignores the idea of female friendship, the driving force of this novel is the friendship between two girls.
"Hang on, Shai," she yelled over the sudden clamor. "I'm coming!"
I can think of a handful of books which contain great female friendships. Karou and Zuzanna in Daughter of Smoke and Bone, for one. What I cannot name is any YA fantasy where the friendship trumps the romance - never mind a book where, as in Radiant, romance is tossed out the window in favour of elevating the importance of friendship.
This is Shai, she reminded herself. It was Shai who pulled her, Shai on the other end of that line, Shai who had to struggle alone for every moment that Xhea delayed.
I would urge people to read Radiant for these two things alone; a main character who is not defined by her love for a boy, and a story built around the incredible friendship between two young women. These things are rare and precious in this genre - maybe in any genre - and Sumner-Smith has my undying devotion for writing them. I cannot put my delight into words. Yes, wonderful romances are wonderful. But when we live in a world that teaches young women to say 'Oh, I'm not like other girls' - when we're encouraged to separate ourselves and judge each other, to view each other warily, as potential threats - it is so important to have examples of female friendship in our fiction. To teach teenage girls that the way to respond to the line 'you're not like other girls' is with a 'what's wrong with other girls?'
All this doesn't even begin to touch on the fantastic story that Sumner-Smith has created. I think we can all agree that the best 'message' in the world will not save a badly-crafted story, but no one needs to worry about that here. Xhia's story is emotional and exciting, more personal than most post-apocalyptic tales. Rather than being out to save the world, Xhia is trying to save her friend and right a terrible wrong. In this way it's actually a little reminiscent of Angelfall, where the driving force of the story was the main character trying to rescue her sister. It's that focus on the smaller picture that makes Radiant so powerful, and wield so much emotional impact.
Then there's the world-building. Sumner-Smith drops tiny hints throughout Radiant of how the world came to be the way it is - we're given references to an event called the Fall, and Xhea and the other citizens of the City are aware that once upon a time, there existed people who built machines instead of using magic. But then there's things like the curses Xhea and the others use - I particularly liked hearing her swear by 'sweetness', since that has all kinds of implications for the views of this society - and the charms Xhea wears in her hair. And alongside the world-building are the plotlines we can see threading throughout the book - questions that quietly set the stage for the sequel, even while allowing Radiant to read like a stand-alone up until the very last pages. Sumner-Smith is clearly uninterested in info-dumping; rather than explaining all the events of Xhea's past, we discover snippets in passing without hearing the full story (yet, hopefully) in a way that feels beautifully realistic - because of course, we rarely learn everything straight away in real life, either, so why should a book be any different?
It doesn't hurt that it also has one of the best opening lines I've read in a while...
Curled in a concrete alcove that had once been a doorway, Xhea watched the City man make his awkward way through the market tents, dragging a ghost behind him.
I mean, come on. Who wouldn't keep reading after that?