Beautiful Shining People: The extraordinary, EPIC speculative masterpiece…

Product Information

Told from the perspective of John, a seventeen-year-old American who has been labelled technology's newest prodigy, the story begins with him landing in Japan in preparation for a business meeting with Sony. Despite the multi-lingual droids that welcome him to a sometime future Tokyo he is alone and lonely, before finding his way to a small café where he meets Neotnia and everything changes. Beautiful Shining People, by Michael Grothaus, is set in Japan in the 2040s, where seventeen-year-old American programmer John is staying while waiting to seal a deal with Sony for a novel translation app he’s written using quantum code, which is opening up new possibilities. The world didn’t seem unrealistic to me and there was so much mystery and YA intertwined that I actually grew to love their strange, futuristic world! There are so many references to Japanese culture and customs, while also taking in account that Beautiful Shining People takes place decades in the future.

Thank you to Anne at Random Things Tours for the invitation to take part and to Karen at Orenda books for the gifted copy of the book. In short, it is a fantastic mash-up of different genres and elements, and a story you won’t soon forget with a cast of characters that will win over your heart long before that final page. And with that smile a fist again contracts inside my chest and I feel the air go just a little bit thin. You'll laugh when you know you shouldn't, be moved when you least expect it and, most importantly, never look at Hollywood, celebrity or sex in the same way again.I’m starting to think publisher Orenda Books has a secret Indiana Jones-style warehouse filled with talented authors and quirky books. But as I drop my hands, something catches my eyes – a few flecks of brightness in that dark hallway that sits between the foyer and dining area. The story takes off here and is stuffed full of futuristic stuff: mid-century politics, AI, believable permutations of the dark web, propaganda, natural and man-made disasters and many twists and turns you will have to read this book to know.

These two narratives pulled at me throughout the reading, like a hologram card that first appears to be one thing and then slides into another. Set in the future, this is second of the minor exceptions to my genre preference rules that I've made this year, but it has been so worth it. So I learned Spanish (I actually have a degree in Spanish philology), went to study in Madrid, Spain when I was 20. The plot doesn't kick in until later, but until then Grothaus wants us to get to know both John and Neotnia and witness their burgeoning romance.For me, this novel poses some of those questions, but beyond the technology there is also a mysticism to the book that takes it into the different realm of being at its core an age-old love story, a Romeo and Juliet for a future age. The Japan setting was an added bonus, because it's not a destination I get to visit often in my books. The author has done such a perfect job of integrating the science into the story that even the unexpected, as jaw-dropping as it is, makes perfect, logical, sense. But they are each hiding a shameful secret, one they try to hide from the world and are terrified of being discovered.