Why Dawn Metcalf Should Consider Witness Protection

December 6, 2011

tags: Dawn Metcalf, Luminous, Writing, YA Book Reviews

I won the book Luminous in a blog contest several months ago. It sat on my to be read pile and I always seemed to find something else to read ahead of it. Not that it’s cover wasn’t gorgeous and inviting, I just wasn’t sure about it. So it sat on my shelf. I even took it along with me to a few of my recent doctor’s visits, but never cracked it open.

Until last night.

And by the time I’d finished the first chapter, the only reason I put it down was to send the following text to my sister: “On Chapter 2 of Luminous by Dawn Metcalf and it is beautiful. Her writing is compelling, true and you feel the words.”

Once in a great while, you come upon a sentence or a phrase or a particular description that makes you cry because you weren’t the one who wrote it. I still remember a specific line from both Maggie Stiefvater’s Shiver and Lisa Mantchev’s Eyes Like Stars. Dawn Metcalf’s Luminous had one on nearly EVERY PAGE! In the first 25 pages, I went from crying because I didn’t write this book to plotting where to stash Metcalf while stealing her identity. Her writing is sparse, yet her words are woven together so powerfully there is never a moment I couldn’t picture the exact setting, action and feel of her world. What would take me a paragraph to write, she conveys in a short sentence. Not only was I awed, I was completely sucked into the story.

“The world snapped open.”

“The world snapped shut.”

As reality slips and time stands still, Consuela finds herself thrust into the world of the Flow. Removed from all she loves into this shifting world overlapping our own, Consuela quickly discovers she has the power to step out of her earthly skin and cloak herself in new ones-skins made from the world around her, crafted from water, fire, air. She is joined by other teens with extraordinary abilities, bound together to safeguard a world they can affect, but where they no longer belong.

When murder threatens to undo the Flow, the Watcher charges Consuela and elusive, attractive V to stop the killer. But the psychopath who threatens her new world may also hold the only key to Consuela’s way home.

Luminous, surprisingly written in third person, opens with the main character, Consuela Louisa Aguilar Chavez battling the dreaded dressing room to find a decent pair of jeans. Right before her life turns utterly inside out. As she struggles to understand what is happening to her, the inner strength she has leads her, and subsequently the reader, through the beauty and the horrors of the Flow. Finding her way back home requires the stripping away of all former conceptions and revealing the core of who she is.

“Know thyself” is what V, her handsome and tortured new friend, keeps whispering to her. In a voice only she can hear. One he is not aware she is hearing. And while she treasures every moment, every accidental touch, she just wants to get home. And V is sure can save her. He must save her.

As more and more of their cohorts are murdered, Consuela must discover what she really believes and how to act without damning herself and the rest of the Flow. I would love to go on and on about the story and how incredible the plot is as well as all the subtle twists and turns, but I cannot bring myself to take those discoveries away from you. Each new revelation pulls you deeper and deeper inside, hurling down corridors one normally only navigates in a dream. All while moving closer and closer to the one danger that could end it all.

If you only buy one more book this year, make it Luminous by Dawn Metcalf. In fact, buy several copies and give them out as Christmas presents. Give one to your local and/or high school library. Chase kids down in Barnes & Noble and shove this book into their hands.

Powerful. Breathtaking. Horrific. Fantastic. Beautiful.

And, because I love this book THAT much, I’m going to give away a copy to one lucky commentator. No, you can’t have my signed copy. Back off.

The rules are simple: