This book was beautiful and healing and I don’t understand why more people don’t talk about it. This book right here is why I love YA.

Great story and loved the romance. Loved the cast of characters and how the story came to be. Great story and I would read this author again.

How To Be Luminous is Harriet Reuter Hapgood’s second book and well, it didn’t quite hit all the notes that The Square Root Of Summer did for me. I was quite excited to read How To Be Luminous. This is the sort of book where I was expecting the writing to be lovely and some interesting imagery as well as to really care about the characters. I did get some of those expectations met, however, this was not 1000% the book for me, and that’s just fine.

How To Be Luminous follows Minnie Sloe who is reeling from when her mother goes missing. Minnie is the middle daughter and has two sisters. Niko is her older sister and goes to SCAD, Niko is Deaf. Emmy-Kate is the youngest and kind of wild. Each girl has a different father and does not know who their father is. Their mother is a famous artist. Anyways, Minnie finds her mother’s note in her studio and ends up losing the ability to see in color. She also isn’t into her boyfriend, Ash, anymore. And so, this book is about Minnie’s coping with her reaction to the trauma of her mother being gone – losing her colors.

I liked how between most of the chapters was a list of the colors Minnie had lost and what they describe. I thought those short pages were brilliantly and beautifully written. Minnie is also completely imperfect and impulsive and I was down for that. It did drive me up the wall that we don’t really find out what happened to the mom – although you can infer. Also, as a parent, the whole thing was outside the realm of my understanding – how and why the mom just ups and leaves/possibly dies by suicide. But well, it was written sensitively.

I think I just wanted this book to be more than it was. I was left not really feeling a whole lot after reading. However, I am several years past the phase in my life when this book would have landed most. Therefore, I do think that actual YA people will likely enjoy this. As for myself, not so much. On the other hand, it was quite well written and the descriptions of the art are fantastic as is the depiction of the connections the Sloe sisters share.

For a book about grief, the is no real plot. We have a missing mother, but the characters don't really address it. They are willfully ignoring her disappearance. As the plot progresses, they address the disappearance. And thath's the majority of the plot. That and the protagonist essentially destroying her life as it is, destroying every unspoken agreement with her sisters and every relationship she's created. This leads to truths about herself and her relationships, of course. But largely this is a lot of meandering contemplation.

This book was beautiful. From start to finish, I was absolutely mesmerized by the language and prose. I was immediately pulled into this whimsical south London town and into the Sloe household. Our main character, Minnie, is struggling with finding her place in her family of artists after the disappearance of their art famous mother, Rachel Sloe. She's also is hit with one of the worst things that could happen to an artist: she's lost her ability to see color.

While there are a few other characters in this book, the focus is on the three sisters.  Minnie feels alone in her grief and it’s slowly sucking her further into a depression—into a life with no color. She doesn't realize that grief manifests in different ways and that her sisters are just as upset and confused as Minnie is.

As she is learning things about her mother that she never noticed before, she sees that maybe her mom's highs and lows weren't just a part of her flighty and artistic personality—that something was actually really wrong and maybe Minnie inherited those same symptoms from her mom. 

This was a difficult, but stunning read that I recommend to any reader who is a little older and mature.

Trigger warning for suicide, grief, and depression.

I was sent an e-arc from NetGalley in exchange for honest reviews.

Thank you to Net Galley and Roaring Brook Press for a digital copy of this ARC in return for an honest review.

In How to Be Luminous by Harriet Reuter Haphood Minnie and her two sisters, Niko and Emmy-Kate, are suddenly left without their mother. Minnie, the middle sister, finds a suicide note in her mother’s art studio but no sign of her body. Niko has to take over as guardian, Minnie loses all her color, and Emmy-Kate is going out at all hours of the night. Their mother was an artist, as well as the three girls, so losing color makes things very difficult, but Minnie doesn’t want to tell anyone, including her boyfriend.

I thought this was a really good book about mental illness and suicide, and I thought all the art was really interesting. I also love whenever one of the characters is deaf.

I thought there might be some sex in the beginning, and I wasn’t a fan of that in a YA novel, but it ended up not happening and being okay. It was also hard for me to get past some of the words the author used to make the story appeal to youth (“eff” and “WTFasaurus”).

How to Be Luminous will be released on April 30.

All the color disappeared from her world along with her mother. While trying to remedy the situation, Minnie worries that she might have inherited more than her mother's artistic ability.

My love for grief and loss books was really satisfied by How to Be Luminous. This book was beautiful, heartbreaking, and poignant. Hapgood's exploration of grief was well executed, and she did a beautiful job capturing the different ways people deal with great losses.

The story was told from the point of view of Minnie, the middle Sloe daughter, but her sisters also played a big role in the story. The three young women were dealing with their mother's disappearance in vastly different ways, and I always appreciate, when the complexities of people's sorrow is shown from different perspectives, because grief is not a one-size-fits-all thing. Hapgood show the good, the bad, and the ugly sides of mourning, and was really able to convey the emotions attached with this process.

The Sloe sisters had put their mother on a pedestal, and would explain away her moods as "starlight and sinkholes". After much soul-searching, and the discovery of a box of prescription drugs, they realized that there was an explanation for their mother's behavior. It was sad to see the girls finally accept that their mother's highs and lows were symptoms of her mental illness, and I felt their pain and anguish with having to admit it to themselves. This conflicted with their vision of who their mother was, and it was obvious how difficult it was for the teens to comes to terms with it.

Throughout the story, Minnie was trying to deal with her emotions, her monochromatism, and the ghost of her mother. By examining the past and making some poor decisions, Minnie was able to process her grief as she discovered new things about herself.

In addition to grief and loss, I love stories with siblings, and this was one interesting trio. Each sister was dealing with the loss of their mother, but there were also some old wounds to contend with. Things were touch and go with the sisters for a while, but in the end, they were there for each other, and I was really pleased with the way Hapgood handled their situation.

Overall: This was a beautifully written book about how people grieve and struggle to come to terms with their loss.

I enjoyed Harriet Reuter Hapgood's previous novel, The Square Root of Summer, and thought this book would be just as enjoyable. Unfortunately, my expectations were not met by this title. I struggled through a few chapters before giving up. I wanted to like this book so much, but it was just so boring. I hate to give a bad review, but I just couldn't finish this title.

I’m always fascinated by the portrayal of grief in fiction, because people experience and react to grief in so many ways in real life and authors can be so skilled at portraying that on the page. This is one of the reasons that I wanted to read How to Be Luminous; the other two reasons are that I liked the author’s previous novel and I was interested in the art aspect. And, even having finished it a couple of weeks ago, I’m still mulling over my feelings about this novel. It’s an interesting character study, since we the readers are intimately ensconced in Minnie’s thoughts and bearing witness to her ups and downs as her emotions run their course. It’s a read with a lot of emotional weight, and the sorrow and anger really permeate every chapter. And the characters, Minnie and her sisters particularly, are not making the best life choices and that can be very frustrating to read about, even though you also understand their logic on some level. But the grieving was portrayed in a very strong way for this individual character experience, and I particularly found it interesting to see how the artistic aspect was woven in. While I can’t necessarily recommend this book with ease (because of the difficult subject matter), I did find it to be a compelling read.

A mix of Where'd You Go Bernadette and The Bell Jar, I sometimes felt this books didn't know what it wanted to be. Also, other than the age of the main character (17), I'd have a difficult time classifying this as YA, and I don't think I'd recommend it to most teenagers. I also would have liked to have seen more growth from the main character.

Really well done. Handling sensitive topics is not an easy thing to do but this was tactful, creative, and honest.