Luminescence Review

Well, I just finished reading Luminescence by J.L. Weil. You can find a synopsis here. Personally, I don’t think that it is one of the best books out there. There’s a laundry list as to what is wrong or left unanswered. Well, first off, this book reads so much like the Twilight series, but instead of it being about vampires, it is about witches. The main comparison is the characters. Bri, the main character, is like Bella in that she’s socially awkward and totally absorbed by her love interest. Gavin, the love interest to Bri, is like Edward: he’s dark and broody. The only difference between Gavin and Edward, besides the witch vs. vampire thing, is that Gavin has a goth/punk look to him. Jared, Gavin’s older brother, is a cross between Emmett and Jacob. Jared has Emmett’s appearance, but Jacob’s ability to shape-shift. Sophie, Gavin’s sister, is like Alice. Sophie, like Alice, has the ability to see the future, but it’s vague until a person makes a decision. Last, but not least, is Gavin’s mom. She is much like Esme in that she is a very nurturing type of mother. The second comparison is the ménage à trois between Bri, Gavin, and Lukas, who is Bri’s friend in her dream world. Then there’s the third, and much smaller, comparison. Bri gets “saved” twice by Gavin: once from a group of drunk guys, and the other from the resident baddie, Morgana le Fay.

The second thing is the plotline. To me, there was no actual plotline. The first half of the book is solely focused on Bri and Gavin’s relationship, and the second half hastily reveals that not only is Bri a witch, but Gavin and his family are witches as well and that Lukas is actually a real person! There are so many questions that were left unanswered. For example, why is it that Bri doesn’t freak out when Gavin said that he was a witch, but completely freaks out and becomes catatonic when she finds out that she’s a witch? If Bri is a witch, then why wasn’t she told about her heritage? Did it come from her father’s side, since Bri’s maternal aunt doesn’t seem to know about it. Or did it come from her mother’s side and her aunt is a witch as well, but for whatever reason, she didn’t tell Bri the truth? Assuming that her aunt knew the truth about Bri, was the reason that Bri wasn’t told in part that her powers or abilities might not manifest at all? Or could it be that Bri’s powers or abilities could have come at any time? Or could it be like the Harry Potter series, where even someone is from a known witch family, they may not have any powers or abilities and vise versa, where someone with no known witch family has powers or abilities? Can Bri tell the truth about her being a witch to her friends? Is magic supposed to be kept secret in this series? If so, why? Did something happen in the past to force it underground? In addition to all of that, who are Lukas and Morgana le Fay? Why are these two characters important to the story? Are they going to play a big part in the subsequent books? Especially Morgana le Fey. Is her story going to be crucial to understanding the subsequent books? And why is it that the incident of Bri burning, unintentionally, the popular girl’s arm, and the ghostly experience at Bri’s friend’s house never really brought up again? I would think that based on how the popular girl was described, she would have made Bri’s life at school even more miserable due to the burning incident.

Anyway, that leads to my next issue. The secondary characters of Bri’s friends and aunt as well as the mean popular girl were little more than stock characters rather than actual fleshed out characters. To me, it seemed that the author only put in these characters in order to show that Bri interacts with other characters than Gavin, his family, and Lukas.

My last complaint is that the grammar and punctuation are not great. I mean, did the author even have someone else proofread the book before it was published? It seemed like the author didn’t have the book proofread. Personally, I don’t like it when there are so many grammar and punctuation issues that could have been prevented by having a proofreader. Now, I get that there will an occasional miss, but still…

Anyway, given my less than glowing review, I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether or not you want to read it.