Thank you to the publisher and netgalley for the arc of this book. All opinions are my own.

I really loved this one! I am not the best at writing reviews sometimes, but sometimes books take you by surprise and this one did just that. I got invested a few chapters in and couldn't put it done. It was so good! I highly recommend this one.

Imagine a near future in which there is a unified Korea, supposedly achieved without violence, though that appears to be an comforting lie. In this near future, huge leaps have been made in robotics and bionics. Jun, a policeman, is a trans man whose transition was aided by the new technologies. His estranged sister, Morgan, is a striving designer at Imagine Friends, a company that makes robots to act as domestics, workers, and pretty much any imaginable personal need (yes, including the one you’re thinking of).

Jun and Morgan had a sibling of a sort when they were kids. Yoyo was a robot invented and made by their father, a visionary in the field who suddenly gave it up—and just as suddenly removed Yoyo from their home, even though Jun and Morgan loved him.

Young girl Ruijie has an illness that attacks her limbs, but she manages well with a bionic suit. She’s obsessed with the robot junkyard next to her school and regularly combs the site, as do many other scavengers who sell robot parts at weekend markets. Ruijie finds Yoyo in the junkyard, operational except for a missing lower leg, and she and Yoyo quickly become friends. So that’s your world-building, which is well done, making it easy to visualize the lives of these characters. The first half of the book is a little confusing at times, and has too much going on, but things improve greatly in the second half, as the action builds toward events that bring the separate characters together, with surprising and intense results.

An imperfect, but thought-provoking, touching and even heartbreaking story.

A dystopia set in a united Korea about a society conflicted over whether robots are family or disposable.

First and foremost, thank you to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for providing me with an eARC for an honest review.

What. A. Book. Honestly, I was expecting good and what I got from Silvia Park was well beyond anything I could've have expected. Set in a reunified Korea in a future where robots are commonplace, Luminous takes you through the journeys of three characters with writing so engaging that it feels as though you are right alongside them as they go about their lives. Park's prose takes a hold of you in a way that I have not had the pleasure of experiencing very often. I wanted to be in this world, to know the depths and intricacies. It was so well built as a world that the characters could've been completely one-note and I still would have enjoyed it. Thankfully, the characters are not one-note, and all provide different insight into what the meaning of being alive is, and how we are shaped by and shape the world arounds us as we move through it. I was surprised in the best way by this story, and highly recommend it a relatively meditative piece of speculative fiction on the nature of existence itself.

Luminous is an ambitious story of a post-war unified Korea, where humanoid robots have fully integrated into society, as workers, citizens, and family members. The narrative follows Jun, a transgender war veteran turned robot crimes detective, his sister, Morgan, who works for the largest and most impressive robot design and manufacturing company, RuiJie, a young girl with a degenerative disease, and Taewon, her friend from summer school who is a North Korean orphan living with his criminal uncle.

Park’s story is impressive in its scope, intellect, and vulnerability. She manages to ask all the important questions: what makes a human a human? What makes a robot a robot? And how do they, as individuals and a society, manage to overlap? How and why do they use each other?

A large portion of the plot centers around a child robot named YoYo, Jun and Morgan’s childhood sibling, gifted to them by their father, a famous roboticist, who was then given to the war effort without their knowledge. Years later, YoYo ingratiates himself with RuiJie and Taewon’s group of friends from their summer school program, just as Morgan’s robot company is launching a new product she designed to mimic YoYo.

The plot was in-depth and enjoyable. Most all the characters (even the robots) were relatable and the integration of robots into society was multilayered and quite interesting. Some of the scientific and robotic minutiae was lost on me, but overall, a very solid novel.

This sci-fi mystery opens in a future world where North and South Korea have been recently reunified, increasingly humanoid AI robots abound but are still treated as disposable objects and bionic implants on humans can repair wounds. Both robots and Northerns have become the embodiment of second-class citizens by the Southern Koreans. This thought-provoking and norm defying novel centers on human/robot relationships and what constitutes sentience, gender, and humanity.

Jun Cho works as a lowly detective in Seoul’s robotic crime unit — lowly as most humans don’t truly care about crimes in which robots are the victims. Jun’s tasked with finding Eli, a beloved older model robot who served as a life companion child to a wealthy woman, and who’s disappeared while out running an errand. In his search, Jun inadvertently stumbles upon his estranged sister Morgan, who’s a personality programmer for the world’s leading robot manufacturer and has been tasked with creating the perfect male child robot. Morgan had distanced herself from Jun when he got seriously wounded as a military soldier in the reunification war and was healed by most his body becoming bionic. Morgan not only has a live-in boyfriend AI lover but has used the personality and prototype of their very human like robot “older brother” Yoyo to form the basis of the new boy robot she’s developing. Yoyo was a special creation of Jun and Morgan’s brilliant Dad who specialized in robot design before abandoning everything to only study biology.

Yoyo has somehow found himself surviving in a robot junk yard, missing a leg, and constantly at the risk of scavengers looking for robot parts. He becomes befriended by a ragtag group of schoolchildren that includes a girl with robotic exoskeleton legs and a young North Korean refugee whose uncle is leading the scrappers’ hunt of valuable robot parts to sell. Yoyo also faces danger from robot traffickers who kidnap and resell robots, as well as human out to abuse robots physically or sexually.

Yoyo comes to embody all that is fraught in human/robot relationships, as well as the emergent humanity of robots, along with a mystery that emerges about YoYo’s larger mission that led the leaving of Jun and Morgan.

Thanks to Simon & Schuster and NetGalley for an advanced reader’s copy.

"If his body was the vastness of the universe, his rage was infinite and luminous."

I'm a sucker for a sad robot story. Add noir elements, and I am hooked.

Reading the description, Luminous sounds like a fairly standard near-future speculative sci-fi. If you're a regular sci-fi reader, you've likely seen these themes explored many times before. But the meticulous execution positions this as a true standout.

There's a raw internality to each of the characters you inhabit as the reader. You're anchored in their perception. You feel claustrophobic in their heads, which adds to the slow build of tension.

The interwoven stories are complex. It would be easy for them to get muddy. But the use of common tropes of the genre makes it easy to follow. A children's summer adventure. A war-hardened detective on a case. A tech employee, searching for self-worth in a soulless megacorp.

Klara and the Sun meets Ghost in the Shell, this is an excellent slow-burn sci-fi and an accessible meeting of literary and speculative fiction.

(ps. it's queer)

My thanks to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for an advance copy of this book of science fiction that take place sometime in the future, where Korea is united, robots are in demand, parents and siblings can drive one crazy, and love can take many forms, but will still break one's heart, either real or processed by logic chips.

I grew up reading science fiction, but fell away as I found that science fiction wasn't really growing up. For a while science fiction was like a parody of that old United States Army slogan: Join the army, travel to new countries, meet new people and kill them. There were still some authors I followed, but a lot of it did nothing to catch my mind, even though I could see numerous titles daily working in bookstores. Within the last few years science fiction has grown up with bigger ideas and better stories, and grown out including more people into the genre and letting them tell stories that are different. And different in American publishing is anything outside our shores. Many of the books that have made me think the most the last couple of months have come from Asia, especially Korea. Luminous by first time novelist Silvia Park is one of those books that I will be thinking about for quite a long time. This is a story about a possible future, where Korea is united, robots are as accepted as pets, families still have issues love is still confusing, and people can still be toxic.

A young girl escapes summer school, climbing into a vast dumping ground of broken robots, her legs encased in braces to keep her moving. Ruijie is eleven, her life has changed as her body starts to break down, and she seeks solace in understanding robotic parts, for that might be her future. Ruijie finds a robot with a broken foot, but one that seems different from anything she has come across. Yoyo is his name, and soon they are having adventures, making new friends, and finding trouble. Jun has never been comfortable with their body, and after being blown up in the war unifying the nation, is uncomfortable in the new one the army presented them with. Jun works a police officer, working crimes against robots, and their latest case, a missing robot, brings Jun back into contact with their sister, Morgan. The two have been estranged for years, problems starting with the disappearance of their older brother, a robot named Yoyo. Morgan is a developer for a company making new robotic companions, boy robots that look very much like Yoyo.

There is so much going on in this book that any seasoned author could easily go off the rails, into the sea and down into the bedrock. For a first time novelist, Silvia Park does everything right, crafting a story that is interesting, fresh, compelling, and thought provoking. There really is a lot of ideas, ideas that would make some authors create whole series, but Park is full of them. The book starts strong and doesn't let up, the story told through a few characters eyes, that never misses, never slows, and constantly unfolds. Little bits add to big bits. There are discussions about the fallibility of memory, and how a wrong rememberance can change one's life. I really can't stop thinking about this world, how everything is crafted, and even though it is the future, the ugly thinking of the past still shadows many achievements and ideas.

I can't praise this book enough. The characters are well-developed and interesting, the story, like life goes to strange places, and yet as a reader I felt a strong mix of emotions at the end. Mostly that I wanted to know more about this future. A book for people who love what science fiction for what it can do, make us want to see the future. And know more.

This was a very interesting book taking a deep look into human robot relationships. The plot(s) were woven nicely together by Park to give the reader a wide lens into what this future could hold where AI and robot technology meet.

The family at the center of this story is made of a human mother, father (ex-human trailblazing robot scientist turned animal robotics scholar) and three offspring - 2 human and one AI/Android robot. The robot is referred to as a sibling. One of the siblings is also at one point in a romantic relationship with another robot which she created in the likeness of a celebrity she admired. Other characters include curious kids, grimey salvage yard workers and a myriad of humanoid robots.

Part missing robot mystery, part story about family struggles and part story about how humanity is using robotic humanoid tech in everyday life, this story was a fun look at what a slice of Earth could become and definitely made this reader think about the pros and cons of it all. Personally I saw more drawbacks in this future. Park drew up something that felt rather sterile, yet very grungy.

I felt the book was drawn out in some areas. The prose was nice and the atmosphere Park created added a lot to the experience of this read.

Thank you to Netgalley, Silvia Park and Simon & Schuster for the early e-copy of this book and the opportunity to provide honest feedback.

Luminous is a solid robots-in-the-future sci-fi read. It deals with the usual moral/practical questions around this kind of technological advancement, but only seems to scratch at the implications. It’s like a meandering river with not many depths or rapids. Usually I enjoy such slower reads but it somehow didn’t fit the theme of the novel. I wish the author would have gotten more into the philosophical/moral parts of the robot thematic. How it is now it’s more of a family story despite the members of it interacting way too little with each other and a general reflection on how to cope with loss (even here the idea of using robots to cope with it is only dealt with very briefly). In the end I had the feeling the book should have started around 3/4 in and should have evolved from there way over its end. I also wished Yoyo would have been explored as a character more. We see his actions but rarely get to know anything about his motivations or opinions.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the earc!

gorgeous prose and fantastic story on this one, would definitely recommend and am hoping does very well. 5 stars. tysm for the arc.

The future, robots, and family. This book somehow makes it all work together. An impressive debut.

Thank you to NetGalley and Simon and Schuster for the DRC.

This novel combines three of my favorite things: stories from Asian authors, science fiction, and robots. In the end, the story did not disappoint. The author gave an ultimately engrossing story about the relationships between humans and robots. The world building of a future where Korea is now unified and robots live amongst humans and humans also have robotic parts if needed was well done. I will say the beginning of the novel was slow and a bit of a slog but once you meet everyone and the story starts to take shape, it becomes a much more rewarding read.

A trio of unusual siblings are trying to navigate their separate lives which are surprisingly similar and start to overlap. This is a sci-fi mystery, set in the future, which revolves around AI and robots. I know this is a popular trend lately, but this one is definitely worth reading. Each of the siblings brings something different to the story and I appreciate the fact that I was interested in all 3 of the storylines (or the individual narrators where there is overlap). I don't want to get into the details too much because there are characteristics about the siblings that you're meant to discover as the story unfolds.

If you're into sci-fi or you have an interest in AI or robots, I definitely recommend this.

I enjoyed this book more than I though that I would. The characters were pretty authentic, even the AI ones. It was a strange experience to read about humans that had robotic parts and robotic characters that seemed as authentic as the humans. In some cases, I liked the AI characters more than the humans - I practically cried for Eli. I am not sure what the final message of the book was to be, but I felt that it was about the bonds within a family, the dysfunction of ... well, everyone. It touched on the savage nature of people as well as the side that ties us to others for our own personal reasons. Yoyo's remembrance of the past while moving forward with his current life was a message of fortitude. A glimpse into the possible future of technology and how it can change our world and us for better and worse.

this book has everything: speculative aspects, childhood trauma, murder, estrangement, forbidden romance, a robot sibling. North versus South, male versus female, robots versus human– all of these prior divisions collapse into a commingled mess. THE PROSE OMG sooo good!

This was really interesting and I liked how the topic was covered. Quite emotional in places and read very well.

I loved the premise of this book but had a very hard time getting into it. I wasn't able to connect with the characters and the pacing made it too easy to step away and I ended up skimming quite a bit. Sorry!

A future where robots live side by side with humans? Yes, please! I loved the concept and desperately wanted to love this book but I struggled with comprehension in the early chapters. Slowly the story came into focus for me and there was a significant shift in the second half of the book. By 70% I knew I was going to love it. At 95% I was obsessed and vowed to read it for a second time. If you struggle in the beginning don’t give up. This read is worth it!

I really wanted to like this book, but reading it felt too much like work. I stepped away from the book several times and struggled to return to it. But the premise of having robots as family seemed so promising. I think I just never connected with any of the characters and the plot moved too slowly for me. This is a fine book for someone, but just not me.