How to be Luminous by Harriet Reuter Hapgood

Summary from Goodreads:

When seventeen-year-old Minnie Sloe's mother disappears, so does her ability to see color. How can young artist Minnie create when all she sees is black-and-white?

Middle child Minnie and her two sisters have always been able to get through anything together: growing up without fathers, living the eccentric artist lifestyle, and riding out their mother's mental highs and lows. But when they lose their mother, Minnie wonders if she could lose everything: her family, her future, her first love . . . and maybe even her mind.

Review:

I remember being super impressed by Hapgood’s first YA book: The Square Root of Summer, so I was really excited to read another book by her. This wasn’t exactly what I was hoping for. It took me a while to get into it. I almost stopped and gave up on this book several times. It’s no that it was bad. I just wasn’t feeling it. It’s sad. And it reads like a lot like a lot of other YA novels where the main character is dealing with the loss of her mother. To be honest, it reminded me a lot of The Astonishing Color of After by Emily X.R. Pan. But, at least that one involves traveling to another country….This one is just really slow.

Eventually, I did slip into the story. I liked the story of the sisters. I found all of the scenes with the three of them together to be the most interesting. I love the idea of a house of artist sisters.

However, I just don’t understand how they couldn’t all communicate. Pretty much all of main character’s problems would have been fixed with more communication, and it drove me crazy that the sisters weren’t talking to each other. None of that seemed healthy. Also, the whole older sister not talking to her younger sister because of a boy….ugh…..and then the love triangle? There were some serious flaws going on here.

I found the color/art elements to be interesting. I liked all the images of the clay, the paintings, the dinosaurs, everything to be so interesting. I genuinely think they added cool details to the story, as compared to just being reasons for why the mom was “flighty,” as is often the case with artist parents in YA novels. And I guess that’s the full circle of my problems. So much of this book is stuff I have seen before. It’s a book of YA tropes: grief, uncommunicative family, loss of a parent, love triangle, magical realism, artistic parent figure who also suffers mental illness, etc. The author’s first book felt so fresh. And this one feels almost the opposite. I was expecting more.

I didn’t hate this. It was perfectly fine. I just wanted more than fine. And I wasn’t in the mood for a grief novel, during a pandemic (which isn’t really the book’s fault), but still. Not the best. I give this one a 6/10.