Luminous

November 1, 2024

Park debuts with a novel that contemplates what it means to be human. In a unified future Korea, robots are integrated into society but remain second-class citizens. An investigation reunites Jun, a detective in the Robot Crimes Unit, with his sister, robot designer Morgan, and unearths deeper mysteries about their country and family, including their lost brother, a nearly human robot. Prepub Alert.

Copyright 2024 Library Journal

Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 6, 2025
Sinister charm exudes from this android-filled mystery by debut author Park. In a near-future, unified Korea, Jun works as a detective in Seoul’s robot crimes unit. He’s searching for a missing AI when he’s reunited with his sister, Morgan, a hotshot “personality programmer” for the robot manufacturer Imagine Friends. The two became estranged after high school when Jun enlisted in the military and was maimed in an accident, requiring much of his body to be replaced by bionic implants. Uneasy with the new Jun, Morgan tries to hide from him that she has a live-in android lover and is modeling Imagine Friends’s next big release after her and Jun’s missing older brother, Yoyo, a humanoid robot. Meanwhile, the broken-down original Yoyo hides out in a junkyard where he befriends a pack of wily schoolchildren, among them a North Korean refugee. Told with mordant wit (Morgan “had lived under the belief that she could be preemptively forgiven for the uniquely monstrous selfishness that preceded genius. But only if she had a cock”), the narrative takes a wide-angled approach to the theme of human-machine convergence. With Ishiguro-esque precision, Park dissects sentience and reality, as well as love and death. This lustrous, challenging work will reward readers who stick with it.

January 1, 2025
Jun, a veteran of the war that reunified Korea who is now a detective for Robot Crimes, has been avoiding his sister, Morgan, since she moved to Korea for work. Unfortunately, a case lands on his desk that starts at her neighbor's apartment: a robot girl named Eli has gone missing. While Jun searches through a grim underworld for Eli, Morgan's team is working on the impending release of a brand-new pair of child robots. A third thread will cross theirs: a child wishing for a fix for her robot-supported body befriends an unusually human robot in the scrap yard. Jun and Morgan have wildly disparate approaches to the family trauma of their brother leaving--Jun, in his mostly bionic body, wallows in VR; Morgan, following in their father's footsteps designing humanlike robots, is building herself the perfect lover. The search for Eli will lead them to some harsh truths about their brother and force them to face their own flawed memories. A well-crafted take on the vagaries of memory and what it means to be human, with a satisfying investigative backbone.

COPYRIGHT(2025) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from March 1, 2025
The lives of two estranged siblings--one a detective in the Robot Crimes Unit and the other a world-class robot programmer--collide when a robot goes missing in a unified Korea. Jun, the cop, is a veteran of the "so-called Bloodless War" that united North and South. He's also trans, and a recovering virtual-reality addict. His younger sister, Morgan, is a lonely corporate pawn gunning for her shine at Imagine Friends, the Apple of a thriving neurobiology industry. Both struggle with the burden of their father's pioneering career in technology along with tremendous grief for Yoyo, the robot brother he introduced into their family when they were children and then took away without explanation. It turns out that Yoyo lives, unbeknownst to his first family, in a nearby junkyard, where a young girl named Ruijie finds him and recognizes how special he is even in a world now replete with robots. Both Jun and Ruijie are disabled, from war injuries and illness respectively, and use robowear, a bionic existence which offers them added kinship with these new members of society. The speculative world Park creates feels remarkably robust: The robot revolution mirrors the way smartphones fundamentally altered modern life in less than a decade and the post-war landscape erupts with familiar tensions around immigrants, refugees, class, civility, violence, and security. There are some problems: The story suffers from an unnecessary withholding of information early on, as well as an overwhelming number of complications. Worldbuilding is one thing--and this world is indeed extraordinarily imagined--but the narrative bulges with tedious scenes and dialogue, questionable structural choices, and too many characters with little import. Still, the second half more than makes up for the misses of the first. Stay with this one for the big philosophical questions it asks about the nature of God, souls, humanity, politics, power, purpose, consciousness, memory, death, and, of course, love. Park is nothing if not ambitious, and the sheer scope of the endeavor is the reward. While stylish, the single word title doesn't do the breadth of the novel justice. A messy, visionary debut.

COPYRIGHT(2025) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.