A poetic tale of a daughter's quiet exploration of her past and how it pushes her forward. Part mystery, part eulogy, McElmurray's lyrical style transformed me from skeptical to fully invested in Miracelle Loving's search for identity, meaning, and love.
~The Rumpus
The pages of Wanting Radiance, a luscious literary novel by Karen Salyer McElmurray, are haunted by characters yearning for love—or something else they can't quite name.... Gorgeous language: words perfectly chosen, rhythmically arranged. McElmurray piles image after radiant image, full of heat and light and smoky mystery. Wanting Radiance is sure to sweep you under its under its dark spell, too.
~Southern Literary Review
Part of what makes Wanting Radiance an important ecofeminist novel is that it is also many other things: a gothic love story, a murder mystery, a revival of Jerry Garcia's bluegrass told by Flannery O'Connor. Voices from the grave haunt the broken hearts of lovers lost and dead. The prose sings the spirit of Appalachia, with sentences that evoke a fiddle's voice or mandolin's woody strum. One can taste the sadness of tragedy while at the same time admiring the scenery of 'mountains soaking up the dawn daylight' or 'wind settling in meadows underneath quiet stars.' Wanting Radiance is a song about the places that feel like home. Home we left behind. Home we head towards. Home we ruin because of how much we want it.
~Lit Pub
What would happen if a woman set out to solve the story of a murder, but made sense of her own life along the way?
~Appalachian Review
'Love goes around and comes back,' according to a song written by Ruby's father. 'Flies out and brings me back to you.' The memorable characters of Wanting Radiance brave long, labyrinthine roads in order to search for the ones they love—or for their belief in love itself.
~Chattanooga Times Free Press
The memorable characters of Wanting Radiance brave long, labyrinthine roads in order to search for the ones they love — or for their belief in love itself.
~Chapter 16
Original, inherently absorbing, deftly crafted, and memorably entertaining, Wanting Radiance by Karen Salyer McElmurray is an extraordinary and unreservedly recommended addition to community and academic library Contemporary American Literary Fiction collections.
~Midwest Book Review
Powerful and lyrical... A page-turner, but one in which the momentum is built not only on a compelling story, but on the integrity and complexity of its characters, the lyricism of each line.... Wanting Radiance is an extraordinary book by an extraordinary writer. It's hard not to see McElmurray in her story, in her characters—the woman with magic in her hands, shuffling the tarot cards, dealing prophecy, showing us who we were, who we are, who we can become. What's possible if we let in a little light.
~Entropy Magazine
Reading Wanting Radiance is like inhabiting the best country music song you've ever heard—the high lonesome, heartbroken, 'wanting and not-having' sort of song—with the added feature of a tough, smart guide who sees deep and who can say, 'I ached with lonely and I wanted to be alone and I wanted nothing at all to do with my own self.' And that's not the only brilliant sentence in this memorable novel. I loved reading it.
~Josephine Humphreys, author of Nowhere Else on Earth (winner of the Southern Book Award)
Brimming with gorgeous prose down to the cellular level, Wanting Radiance is a magical treasure hunt through tarot cards and freak-show oddities, murder mysteries and voices from the grave. Readers will fall hard for Ruby and Miracelle, wounded nomads yearning for love and a place to call home.
~Marie Manilla, author of The Patron Saint of Ugly
In vivid prose that reads like pure poetry, Karen McElmurray has written an incantatory Appalachian gothic tale of love, murder, and restless souls, populated with unforgettable flesh-and-blood characters. Wanting Radiance is nothing less than a literary masterpiece.
~Amy Greene, author of Bloodroot and Long Man: A Novel
Wanting Radiance weaves a beautiful tale of Miracelle Loving's pursuit for identity, populated by tarot cards, southern diners, fiddle players, tattoos, and the sweet night air on roads to nowhere. McElmurray's dreamy language transcends this plane to bridge the liminal spaces between the past and present, life and death, who we were and who we might become.
~Liz Prato, author of Volcanoes, Palm Trees, and Privilege: Essays on Hawai'i
This book is brimming with haints, lives full of magic, and Karen McElmurray's storytelling is the most haunting of all.
~Crystal Wilkinson, author of The Birds of Opulence
