Catherynne Valente's epic space odyssey Radiance bears resemblance to many a story of adventure, danger and voyages far from home: it centers on a beautiful woman. At the dawn of movies and interplanetary travel, the blue-skinned, mercurial Severin Unck is a beloved director, partner and daughter, and her disappearance during a shoot in a Venusian village is the spark that propels this novel into its suspenseful terrain.
Before the first sentence, Valente (The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making) establishes a 100-year alternate-history timeline--from the first ship bound for space to Severin's father's attempts to eulogize his daughter in the 1960s. The deliberateness with which she navigates bloodlines, locations and films evokes García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, as does the prose, with lushness occasionally bordering on the flowery. Still, every character is enchanting, even minor players like aging soap opera star Violet El-Hashem. The empathetic cast ensures that the reader cares about more than just stars, both literal and cinematic; a subplot about whale-like beasts speared to extract callowmilk, which enables humans to live outside Earth, imbues the story with gravity other epics lack.
Dig through layers of talkies, love affairs and trips across the galaxy, and Radiance's pulse is its meditation on the stories we tell: Is anyone really the author of their own fate? Is there such thing as an ending, or even a clean beginning? When it comes to something this beautifully made, it's hard to protest when one story inevitably ebbs into another. --Linnie Greene, freelance writer