Radiant Shimmering Light
A Novel
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4.2 • 13 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A sharply funny and wise debut novel about female friendship, the face we show the world online and letting your own light shine, from the Scotiabank Giller Prize–shortlisted author of This Cake Is for the Party
Lilian Quick has looked up to her cousin Florence her whole life. Florence is everything Lilian is not—brave, confident, quick to find adventure and American. The women have been out of touch for years due to a family rift, but Lilian, childless, single and self-employed as a pet portraitist, has been watching Florence for years. Florence is now Internet-famous as Eleven Novak, the face of a compelling new feminine lifestyle empowerment brand.
When Eleven comes to town as part of her sales tour, she offers Lilian a place at the Temple, her Manhattan office. Despite twenty years of silence, Eleven welcomes her long-lost cousin with open arms, and the two women begin a new relationship. Lilian quickly enrols in the Ascendency, Eleven’s signature program: an expensive three-month training seminar on empowered leadership, spiritual awakening, and sales and marketing. Eleven is going to help her cousin rise up to be her highest self: confident, affluent and self-actualized.
Lilian’s sensitive, artistic nature is stretched by the work she does in the Ascendency, and pushed even further by her cousin’s careful life coaching. In just three months, Lilian’s life changes drastically and becomes everything she’s dreamed of. But is it everything she wants? And can she trust everything Eleven says?
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
You’ll want to #treatyoself to Sarah Selecky’s plucky debut, a sharp satire of the worlds of wellness, brand marketing, and social media. The novel follows cousins Lilian and Florence—a pet-aura painter and Internet empowerment guru, respectively—as they rekindle their relationship after years apart. Selecky’s tongue-in-cheek approach to the self-help industry is pitch-perfect, and her take on friendships between women is astute and, you know, enlightened.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Can you be your authentic self and make a living? Selecky (The Cake Is for the Party) plants that question at the heart of her page-turning debut, which revolves around two cousins who reconnect after a 20-year estrangement. Lillian Quick, 40, an unmarried virgin, lives hand-to-mouth following her passion as a pet portrait artist with a special talent: she envisions animals' auras and includes them in her paintings. Her cousin, Florence Novak, persevered through an abusive childhood and recreated herself as Eleven Novak, the woman behind The Ascendency, a feminine empowerment brand that promises to turn enrollees into financially successful, spiritually evolved entrepreneurs especially if they promote the program and/or the select items that Eleven endorses. Eleven recruits her cousin to join the movement and Lillian gains some career traction, but what catapults her to internet fame is a webzine confession about losing her virginity to an unnamed Ascendency-affiliated meditation guru, who hid his committed relationship from her. The author explores the power and distraction of social media, the paths to creativity, and how intense devotion to a cause can either consume one's identity or allow one to flourish, resulting in a searing look at mass market oriented transformation.
Customer Reviews
Radiant Shimmering Light
Radiant Shimmering Light is funny, tender and bittersweet (Yumi!). So eager to see what was happening with the protagonist, Lilian, and her amazing journey, I couldn’t put this book down. Wonderful writing and a fascinating of-the-moment story and at the end of it, I wanted more.