BOOK TOUR STOP x RANDOM THINGS TOURS: Beautiful Shining People by Michael Grothaus

 

It’s our world, but decades into the future … an ordinary world, where cars drive themselves, drones glide across the sky, and robots work in burger shops. There are two superpowers and a digital Cold War, but all conflicts are safely oceans away. People get up, work, and have dinner. Everything is as it should be… Except for seventeen-year-old John, a tech prodigy from a damaged family, who hides a deeply personal secret. But everything starts to change for him when he enters a tiny café on a cold Tokyo night. A café run by a disgraced sumo wrestler, where a peculiar dog with a spherical head lives, alongside its owner, enigmatic waitress Neotnia … 

But Neotnia hides a secret of her own – a secret that will turn John’s unhappy life upside down. A secret that will take them from the neon streets of Tokyo to Hiroshima’s tragic past to the snowy mountains of Nagano. A secret that reveals that this world is anything ordinary – and it’s about to change forever…

"If we want to find meaning in our lives, we need to make our own. But not robots  they have meaning built right in."

In a world that feels oddly familiar and strangely alienating, this hauntingly poetic speculative novel is something special. Immediately we are transported to a polished version of our own home made of neon and chrome. Robots that can tell us anything we desire, do anything we desire - something that should seem to idyllic and utopian but feels anything but. We are kept safe by 'othering' all the dangers of the world, convincing ourselves it'd never happen here, not to us. 

John is a strange character - young and curious, both clueless and clever at once. He sees the world in an interesting way, and as our main narrator we watch as he tries to figure out his place in it. I appreciated his honesty, his youthful awkwardness, his need for saying exactly what he's thinking. At times his voice felt distant, disconnected, but slowly we learn more about him and find that connection. I couldn't help but immediately be intrigued by Neotnia, she was alluring, intense - I wanted to know more about her and how she came to this quiet life in a cafe with Goedio the ex sumo and a dog named dog. The secrets everybody is hiding jump from small, to peculiar, to dangerous as they're all revealed in the most unexpected of ways. All of them had a clear personality, with a distinct vulnerability and loneliness that joins them together and you can see how these struggles have shaped them.

The storyline moves slowly, but no pages are wasted - we see life as John arrives in Japan and meets his unlikely new friends, and how this life turns into something surreal before our eyes. It takes time setting the scene and luring us in until everything suddenly fits into place for a high-octane, cinematic finale taken straight from the big screen. We find the quiet dangers in a world that is so loud you might not hear them, and take a deep look into the complexities of artificial intelligence, technological advances and the impacts it can have on life in the most authentic and thought-provoking ways.

A striking and strange novel, about beautiful shining people in all their strangeness - and a searing statement about the dangerously thin lines between utopia and dystopia. 

I was gifted an advanced reviewers copy of this title in return for an honest review. Thank you to Anne at Random Things and Karen at Orenda for inviting me to take part in this tour.

cw: loss, illness, death, complex families, sex, estrangement, violence.