Another ARC I requested just for the cover haha. Absolutely gorgeous cover, and another I would buy a copy of the book just to have on my shelf!

I really wanted to love this book—but there was too much going on for any emotional poignancy. The idea was interesting but didn’t hook me completely unfortunately.

Set in a hypothetically reunified (and futuristically robot-driven) Korea, this novel focuses on the relationship between humans and technology—and what it means to be human.

Thank you to Netgalley, the publisher, and the author for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

I so wanted to love this. Dystopian novels are tricky for me. Some I really love, and some are downright confusing. The writing style is what lowered my excitement for this novel. The prose was so meandering and wonky. The characters were much more defined and complex which I appreciate. This is a very ambitious story, and sometimes I felt the author was in over her head. Too many storylines, and not enough clarity or poignancy. It’s a mixed bag for me. The cover art is absolutely gorgeous though.

Luminous (publication day March 11, 2025) by Silvia Park, starts out slowly, but as it picked up speed I was enthralled. Set in a hypothetically reunified Korea, robots have become ubiquitous, so much so that the police have a “robot crimes” unit to investigate crimes against robots. Jun is a detective assigned to the robot crimes unit. He was once a soldier in the “bloodless” unification war and, due to an encounter with an IED that damaged nearly 80% of his body, is mostly bionic. He’s also trans, and the child of a famous roboticist who brought one of his creations home to be a brother for his two children.

Jun’s sister, Morgan, works for Imagine Friends, one of the leading companies designing robots, and the company is about to reveal its newest model, Morgan being one of its primary architects. His name is Yoyo, after Morgan and Jun’s robot brother, who just disappeared one day. Morgan also lives with another robot she created–Stephen–who is supposed to be her boyfriend, but they haven’t done anything beyond friendship yet.

Jun hasn’t talked to Morgan for five years, but he’s investigating a missing robot who belongs to one of Morgan’s neighbors. It’s an older model, a child really, and Morgan’s robot, Stephen, had been friends with the missing robot.

Meanwhile, a group of kids in summer school hang out at a junkyard next door after school and meet a robot not like any other, whose name is Yoyo. One girl has a bionic suit because of her illness, and another, who is from the north and lives for playing soccer, also lives with his uncle, who salvages robots and their parts. Of course, as in all good novels, all of the characters come together at the end.

I really enjoyed it–it will give book groups much to discuss. There are some similarities with Klara and the Sun, but it is truly its own novel. I will call it weight-neutral, as there were few descriptions of body size or shape.

I was torn about this one. Set in a future, unified Korea, this novel explores many of the lines between robots and humans in a world where they are starting to meld. The themes are explored through a dysfunctional family consisting of two robot designers (father and daughter) and one military veteran (son) whose injuries required significant bionic replacement. The third sibling was a robot designed by the father, whose dusappearance has permanently traumatized the family. A separate storyline explores the found family of a group of children who hang out in a local robot junkyard, who find the missing robot sibling. There were interesting concepts, but the prose was so clunky. There were both a series of amazing coincidences and multiple tangents that were distracting. It just was not for me.

Luminous by Silvia Park is a dystopian novel set in a theoretical unified Korea. Here, technological advancements in human-like robots as well as bionic parts have changed the way society functions at its core. Jun, a police officer, navigates life with the aid of bionics, while his sister, Morgan works as a robot designer to create robots for quite literally any purpose.

Jun and Morgan once had a robot companion, Yoyo. However, Yoyo was removed from their home, leaving them with resentment, unease, and heartbreak.

However, Liu, who suffers from a limb illness, utilizes the aid of a bionic suit to manager her condition. Eventually, Yoyo is found in a scrapyard by Liu and they begin to bond. As a result, this then sets the stage for Jun, Morgan, Liu and Yoyo's lives to converge once more.

While I liked the concept of this book, I felt that, at times, it was extremely clunky. It was also trying to combat SO MUCH. Sexism, classism, ableism, sexual assault, trauma, and war. I felt that this book would've been better suited to focusing on maybe three or four, because at times the plot suffered due to how much was trying to be talked about.



However, that aside, Luminous is, for the most part, a wonderfully written debut novel. I would highly reccomend it to lovers of found family, science fiction, dystopia, and combatting darker topics. It definitely leaves a lasting impact.

As someone new to reading about robots, this was a fantastic entry point. I sped through the story and enjoyed how it mixed futuristic themes with reality.

Such a unique book. Near future, AI and robots are main stream. The Koreas are united. Very dystopian.

Lots of characters and sometimes easy to lose track of them. But I loved the family dynamic between Jun and his sister Morgan. Jun is part bionic due to injuries sustained in the war and is now a detective tasked with searching for missing robots. Morgan followed in her father’s footsteps and is a robotic engineer. But everyone is still traumatically tied to their childhood robot, Yoyo.

Some really disturbing imagery with the abuse and neglect of the very human like robots.

Great characters and world building. Will definitely read more from this author.

Luminous by Silvia Park is the story of a dysfunctional family, focusing on three siblings. Set in the future in a unified Korea, Jun is a demoralized detective with a significant amount of bionic hardware. His sister, Morgan, followed in their father’s footsteps and is a robot engineer. The third sibling, Yoyo—a fully automated robot-- disappeared when they were all young. School children find an abandoned robot named Yoyo in a scrapyard and form a found family.

This story covers many themes, exploring the definitions of gender, family, and identity, as well as addressing issues like classism, ableism, environmentalism, and capitalism. It also tackles difficult topics such as sexual abuse and war. Although very well written, with some really lovely sentences, I think the author tried to cover a bit too much here. I lost the plot on occasion trying to keep up with multiple situations and why we were so often chasing rabbits. Still, the characters, both human and robot, were very well characterized and easy to become attached to, particularly the children. I found the relationship between Yoyo and Taekwon (one of the children) to be particularly poignant, and the interactions with Steven (a robot) and Morgan made some interesting points about many of the topics above.

Science fiction is typically not one of my favorite genres, but this novel doesn’t spend a good deal of time with the technical, “science-y” aspect, making it more readable for me, personally. I would be interested in reading more from this author.

Thank you to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for the eARC.

3.5 stars rounded to 4

A touching, fun read! Usually I dislike and get drawn out when a book has multiple POVs, but in this case it’s the complete opposite. With a readable prose and engaging plot, Park crafted a book that actually CARES about the reader and the experience, which is hard for contemporary authors to do apparently. Sometimes I got a bit discombobulated with the plot, but it got cleared up quickly.

This story captivated me with its unique premise and richly imagined world, exploring a society where robots are integrated into every aspect of life, from companions to children. The depth of the world-building is impressive, and I enjoyed the time spent on the philosophical exploration of what it means to be human in a time when boundaries between robots and humans are increasingly blurred.

The novel does a fantastic job of combining a complex plot with emotional depth. I kept coming back to its themes of memory, grief, and loss of identity, and found the characters’ emotional journeys to be compelling, especially in how they deal with their pasts and their relationships with the robots. The novel’s exploration of the blurred lines between human and machine, and its exploration of family dynamics, is a thoughtful and thought-provoking read, perfect for fans of speculative fiction with deep philosophical undertones.

Luminous is a sweeping debut, and as soon as I read the summary I knew this was going to be right up my alley. Silvia Park's writing did not disappoint; the prose was delightfully unique and engaging. I really appreciated the way that this work explores the ethics of a humanoid robot society from multiple interesting lenses. I've unintentionally consumed two other pieces of media (AnnieBot and Companion) that deal with the exact same topic in the last month, and I was relieved and excited to explore a side of this dystopia that did not deal exclusively, or at all, with robot sex girlfriends and their abusive human male partners. I enjoyed all four of our main characters and found them all wonderfully complex. The reason I docked this down to 4 stars is because I felt vaguely confused during a large chunk of this book and wanted a couple more answers. Primarily, I wanted a better explanation of Jun's gender & PTSD, and I wanted to know more about Yoyo's childhood with his siblings. I felt like those two things would have given me a better understanding of Morgan and Jun's actions. Regardless- I really enjoyed this book, and I can't wait for more people to read it!

I want to both sit with this and turn this over in my head forever and immediately go back and re-read it. It's really one that unfolds, revealing more and more as it does in a way that makes it hard to remember that this is a debut novel. It's so well-steeped in thoughts on humanity and memory and identity (we've got robots, bionic humans, trans identity, cultural identity, codeshifting, just to name a few) but still paces itself and weaves all of the different throughlines together so well that you become more and more drawn in.

It's the sort of novel that small asides by a character later spiral into such importance that you flip back to re-read the /exact/ wording because it makes that much of a difference. The concept of memory - paralleled by an artificial intelligence as one that can never forget - is constant companion to all of the characters and their growth. How memories shape us, how fallible memory can be, how trauma can rewrite memory, how people can take on the emotions of another's memories as if it were their own - and of course, their robotic parallels and what it means for our main robot characters and their humanity. The idea of a ghost in the shell is never explicitly called out, but it hovers around every time we see a broken robotic shell, every time a human talks about rebooting or refreshing a robot's memory, and honestly everything about Stephen and Yoyo. In an increasingly automated world, the book also digs into the idea of what it means to love and be loved and how memory and choice plays into that (and somehow addresses a lot of my issues I didn't even knew I had with reincarnation romances where they have previous lives' memories).

It's also so important to note that this is a near-future unified Korea, and the geopolitical situation and lingering trauma over both the separation and unification is so present in every interaction even when it's not explicitly about the war(s).

In writing this, I just keep finding ways that all of the themes are woven throughout all of the characters and scenarios and I keep being in awe that this is a debut novel.

A Near State of Transition

“Bionic. Transhuman. Posthuman. The world made a promise to her: death is a problem that can be solved.”

Silvia Park’s 2025 near-future novel, "Luminous”, set in a recently united Korea, imagines a world with multiple stages of personality development existing side-by-side in human, robotic and integrated human-robotic forms. Their lives appear simple but, below the surface, more complex with unusual twists and implications for biological life as we experience it.

After a brief prologue, the story opens with the Seoul Robot Crimes unit investigating the disappearance of a young female robot, Eli. Quickly, the situation moves into a deeper exploration of a society with seemingly traditional crimes that has more dynamic issues: will humans outlast their transitional and post-human forms in a more programmed world?

The storyline follows three groups of people as they come to terms with converging situations:

• Liu Ruije, an older woman who uses a mechanical support vest to aid her declining body and her robotic companion, Yoyo; and a group of younger human companions, Taewon, Wonsuk, Mars and Amelia, exploring the robot cast-off wastelands of earlier models
• Detective Cho Jun, a human member of Robot Crimes, with restored mobility through robotic aides due to a prior accident and whose assignment is to track down Elisha or “Eli, child version of Sakura, the popular “girl next door” robot from Imagine Friends and
• Morgan, Cho’s sister, a personality programmer for Imagine Friends who is launching a new release of robotic companion designs, Future X Children, with Boy X, her design, to be the star of the launch and her own robotic companion, Stephen

Additional shadowy personalities are Cho Yosep, Morgan and Cho’s father, and his deceased partner, Kanemoto Masaaki, founder of Imagine Friends.

Just imagine Barbie, Ken and their many iterations larger, mechanically smooth enough to pass for human forms, including intimate physical contact, and programmed to anticipate their human companions’ needs and desires with the devotion of pets.

But are they devoted as they are redesigned with new physical and behavior traits while storing previous learned memories, good and bad, that carry to the next design generation through a visible “luminous” cloud transfer?

And will they ultimately outlast humans and learn to self-program their own future replications?

The story takes time to unfold and can be frustrating to sustain interest due to various diversions and getting familiar with names and local references to places, food, etc. Like a Dickens novel, the plot is dense but a rewarding speculation.

The questions raised were anticipated by Czech science fiction writer, Karel Capek, in his 1920 groundbreaking novel and play, “RUR, Rossum’s’ Universal Robots”, introducing the world to the now familiar term, robot.

A speculative-fiction story that contains a little bit of everything, from robot siblings to childhood trauma and forbidden romance; not to mention the rather in-depth and candid discussions on grief and what it means to really be human.... again, this book has it all! Now, in light of this, does it stick the landing? For the most part, yes. At least to me, anyway. I enjoyed the prose but did find it a bit stilted at times (as in, it felt like it flip-flopped back and forth, but maybe this was done on purpose?). Either way, I thought the story was engaging and unique enough to ignore those inconsistencies, and ultimately would definitely recommend this one out to all my SFF lovers (and everyone else too). PLUS— just look at the cover!!! Absolutely captivating.

I am once again emotional about fictional robots. This is such an emotionally gripping story, and even though the characters are messy and sometimes awful, I loved them so much. The things that the narrative has to say about what it means to be human, and what it means to love someone and be loved in return, regardless of if you are actually a human or a robot, had me in tears. The prose was a little jumpy/choppy at times, so it wasn't a full five stars, but I still loved this to pieces.

For my fellow Person of Interest fans, reading this book constantly reminded me of this interaction between Arthur and Harold:

"Your child is a dancing star."
"It's not a child. It's a machine."
"It's a false dichotomy; it's all electricity. Does it make you laugh? Does it make you weep?"
"Yes."
"What's more human?"

I wanted to love this one so bad but I had such a difficult time connecting with the writing style. It felt really all over the place. I know this will work for some people but it was a miss for me. I love the idea behind it so I can see myself recommending it to people who would be interested in this story but I felt like I was dragging though the entire book.

This is my Klara and the Sun. Literally has everything and more in the slog that Ishiguro presents. Not only is humanity found throughout siblingship and the ethos of Korean life and living, but in sentimental hypotheses of the future.

This novel is complicated and beautifully written. The world building was heavy, even for speculative fiction, which caused me to take things slow at the beginning. But I am glad for that because as I reached the halfway point I couldn’t stop reading.

I think the blurb does a good job covering the major themes of the book, but I did find this to be primarily an emotional journey. The plot exists as a stage for Park’s characters to be explored. I found each of them heartbreaking in their own way. That being said there is plenty of action throughout the book. I found the portrayal of a trans character to be honest and not shoe horned in any way.

And this is without a doubt the most beautiful cover I have seen in years. I am excited for everyone to read this one. Thank you Simon & Schuster for the ARC.

I think there might be a good story here but it's written such a nonmusical clunky style that I couldn't engage with it. People who read for story only may have a better experience.

This is going to be huge. I was so obsessed with this book from the summary, and was hooked just a few pages in. Other futuristic books sometimes fail to hold emotional weight, and this one is so spectacular. Set in a unified Korea and following three estranged siblings (two human, one robot!!) this will have you in love right away.