Radiance by Grace Draven

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I thought I’ll love this book when I reached the part where human appearance was described from the ‘outside’ eyes in all its ugliness. I liked the touch.
In the end, I did love some things about this concept, but I can’t say I 100% believe that it was executed to its full potential. I feel like there was a big stress on differences between races regarding concepts of beauty, and such things as food, but then we hardly got to see any substantial cultural differences. I feel like there are human cultures that have more behavioral differences than humans and Kai have, and in that respect I feel like the concept was underdeveloped.
Also, in our day and age(of watching all kinds of aliens and fantasy races on tv), I do find this idea difficult to actually believe… Should we have been imagining Kai to look like Uruk-hai so it would be easier to get behind the idea of humans being repulsed by their appearance? Otherwise, I didn’t really find much reasons in the descriptions to understand why were they considered ugly by humans.

And minus points for the bloody ending. I find it’s very unfortunate where the ending makes you not look forward to the sequels.



View all my reviews