Radiant Shimmering Light
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
A nuanced satire--both hilarious and disconcerting--that probes the blurred lines between empowerment, spirituality, and consumerism in our online lives.
Lilian Quick is 40, single, and childless, working as a pet portrait artist. She paints the colored light only she can see, but animal aura portraits are a niche market at best. She's working hard to build her brand on social media and struggling to pay the rent.
Her estranged cousin has become internet-famous as "Eleven" Novak, the face of a massive feminine lifestyle empowerment brand, and when Eleven comes to town on tour, the two women reconnect. Despite twenty years of unexplained silence, Eleven offers Lilian a place at The Temple, her Manhattan office. Lilian accepts, moves to New York, and quickly enrolls in The Ascendency, Eleven's signature program: an expensive, three-month training seminar on leadership, spiritual awakening, and marketing. Eleven is going to help her cousin become her best self: confident, affluent, and self-actualized.
In just three months, Lilian's life changes drastically: She learns how to break her negative thought patterns, achieves financial solvency, grows an active and engaged online following, and builds authentic friendships. She finally feels seen for who she really is. Success! . . . But can Lilian trust everything Eleven says? This compelling, heartfelt satire asks us: How do we recognize authenticity when storytelling and magic have been co-opted by marketing?
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.
