Radiant Shimmering Light

October 29, 2018
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.

October 1, 2018
Dear fill-in-the-blank, we are excited to embark on this journey of transformation with you. Please follow the link at the end of this newsletter to make sure your credit card info is up-to-date.Recently having turned 40 and living in Toronto on a shoestring, Lilian Quick is trying to follow all the rules for self-promotion and personal enlightenment and negotiate the tricky, emerging overlap between the two. Since she was young, Lilian has seen animal auras, and her pet portrait work includes these glowing colors. Her attempts to grow her business can be painfully, hilariously bumbling (she often scolds herself for negative self-talk). But just as she's poised to gain a larger audience thanks to a commission from Canada's most famous female poet/skin-care entrepreneur, she is also invited to work at the Temple--the New York headquarters of spiritual self-help guru Eleven Novak, who happens to be Lilian's cousin and childhood intimate. Since she has been following Eleven's teachings anyway ("Live the way you love to feel" is one; you can get it on a phone case), and since that gig seems more likely to provide financial stability, Lilian says yes and finds herself dropped into the heart of the sausage-making factory. Lilian is a sponge for these teachings and wildly suggestible. Eleven is a class-A manipulator, and her business is a transparent pyramid scheme. But Selecky refuses to work strictly in tropes. What begins as a killer satire opens up to some messy ideas: Spiritual teachings can be mostly bunk but partly useful. Women are easy marks but that's because they are rightfully hungry for empowerment. And Lilian herself has strange and lovely depths that she manages to plumb thanks to--or in spite of--the work.A funny, tender, gimlet-eyed dive into the cult of self-improvement.

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November 1, 2018
Selecky's biting, tragicomic first novel is an insider look at the intersection between the sincerity of belief and the commodification of aspiration. Lillian Quick is middle-aged, broke, living in a dingy Toronto apartment, attempting to live her artist dream as a pet portraitist possessed of a special skill: she can see the auras surrounding animals. A chance online encounter with Eleven Novak, founder of the wildly successful Ascendency self-actualization program, reveals her to be Lillian's long-lost cousin Florence, with whom she hasn't spoken in 20 years. She jumps at the offer to join the Ascendency and relocate to its New York City headquarters as a marketing executive. Lillian soon emerges as a font of aphorisms and a haphazard follower of self-improvement practices gleaned from her devotion to social-media-famous lifestyle gurus and primed to be an object of pity and ridicule. Lillian's sincerity is endearing if infuriating. Selecky's deadpan tone, punchy writing, and vivid characters transport readers to a specific, highly diverting world that hits close to the bone and sparks the self-reflection it's spoofing.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)