Luminous and Ominous

review copy provided by author

It is the year 2014 and what is left of the world are the effects of an event that took place two years before. In our near future five meteors have fallen to earth and from them has sprouted a new life form – Cornucopia Blue. Vegetation with roots and fruits whose colours range from blue to violet grew out of the meteors and without hesitation quickly and silently flourished. Henry, an employee at a nursing home, received a warning three days before the rest of the world and with this warning had to quickly decide who he was going to save and who he was going to leave behind.

Now Henry is pretty much your everyday average guy and when I say that I don't mean like in some movies where the protagonist comes off as a normal guy but actually has a past where he used to be in the Navy Seals or CIA. No, he really is normal, no special training, and no time in his past where he was a total badass. Nothing in his life that would perfectly prepare him for the end of the world he knows. And I think that's what made him such a believable and life like character. Actually all the characters in this novel could have been anyone passing you on the street, but now their life isn't normal and they have to adapt to this new way of life, fight it, or die.

Cornucopia Blue is like an incurable sickness inflicting the very Earth itself. You can try to destroy it through fire bombing or even nuclear attack but the effects are only temporary because even though lives are lost the Cornucopia Blue still thrives and from it sprouts new life that does whatever it can to live.

The timeline shifts back and forth between the year 2014 and 2012 - when the meteors first fell. In the present we have Henry travelling with the last two survivors of his original twenty-two companions searching for a place that still resembles old Earth and in the past we see the original twenty-two and find out what happened to them. The transitions are done well and carry the story along at a smooth pace, and as the story progressed I would start to dread reading about the past events because part of me didn't want to know what had happened to the other survivors to cause them to no longer be with our three-man group. There were times when I would even pause to do something else because I did not want to find out but I couldn't stay away for long. I needed to know how it ended.

Luminous and Ominous is definitely a story that makes you think, the Cornucopia Blue wasn't a cataclysmic even that destroyed the world but is a much more beautiful replacement. The colours of the vegetation leave the characters staring in awe; the ripe fruits change you when you eat them but seem to cause no harm and everything just seems to be much more vivid. Could you imagine watching the world from space, a ball of indigo and violet glowing in the dark vacuum? It makes you wonder if the change really is a horrible thing or would it be better to just accept what has happened? And is accepting this change giving up or is it a step towards survival?

Despite the great story however there were some things that could have made it better. The writing could have benefitted from some more editing when it came to exclamation abuse and some dialogue that at times didn't fit with the rest of the story, but other than that this was a great read that had me thinking about it for days after I finished it.