Luminous
by Dawn Metcalf
Available 07/07/11
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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.
This is another title of the 2011 books I have been eagerly anticipating. I'm thrilled that I finally get a Latina hero with a supernatural twist. Her "superpower" is just beyond what I could have imagined, "...when sixteen-year old Consuela discovers she can remove her skin, revealing a lustrous mother-of-pearl skeleton... crafting skins out of anything – air, water, feathers, fire – she is compelled to save ordinary people from dying before their time." amazingly evocative, this story has all the potential to be a memorable for all the right reasons.
The only thing that could possibly tarnish all this potential for me is if for some inexplicable reason the character of Consuela answers "Si" instead of "Yes" (when speaking English), or says "Papa" instead of "Dad," because as a Mexican-American, no one I know does that. The only people, in my experience, that do that are non-Spanish speaking writers when they are trying to write for a Latino character. I hope this does not apply whatsoever to the author Dawn Metcalf!
UPDATE 11/16/10
After posting about Luminous I was amazed to see an email from Dawn Metcalf in my inbox, it was as if my fairy godmother had come to put my fears to rest and almost gave me a heart attack in the process. Here is what she wrote:
UPDATE 11/16/10
After posting about Luminous I was amazed to see an email from Dawn Metcalf in my inbox, it was as if my fairy godmother had come to put my fears to rest and almost gave me a heart attack in the process. Here is what she wrote:
"...I thought I'd be behind-the-curtain and assure you that there is no "Si" or "Papa" in this book because I always felt the same way! Consuela is Mexican-American, raised in the U.S. whose powers generate from her cultural heritage (there is a lot of Dia de los Muertos in this book). She also is the type of girl who gets mad at the jean industry rather than her body when pants don't fit and loves her two-parent family more than anything. Crazy, I tell you."
"...The whole idea for Consuela came out of a geeky conversation with my admittedly geeky friends about why there were no really good "minority" superheroes out there and why the heck were all the female superheroines wearing skimpy costumes while saving the world?! In that instant, I remembered an old Jose Posada image from some college anthropology class and joked that I'd like to see folks sex-up a girl skeleton! And there was Consuela: a modern-day myth of the Day of the Dead."If this doesn't make you want to go pre-order yourself a copy of Luminous then you are crazy banannas.
