Spotlight on Canadian Authors: The Radiant City by Lauren B. Davis, the review

Although the POV, (3rd person present tense), was startling at first, Davis’s easy style and the story’s beautiful language draws this reader in effortlessly. Soon the unfamiliar POV was an afterthought and I was swept away on a poignant and gripping tale about Matthew Bowles, an ex-war correspondent who escapes to the streets of Paris, the Radiant City, hoping to do nothing more than to lose himself and his painful memories. He’s agreed to write a book about his experience in war torn countries around the world but struggles, as each page brings the memories and trauma of those years flooding back to him.

Matthew meets Saida, a Lebanese woman who runs a café near Matthew's apartment, along with her son, Joseph, and her father and brother, Elias and Ramzi. Saida has survived horrific events as well and seeks to find that safe place she used to know within her family’s loving embrace. But her family is pulling away from her and she is as lost as Matthew in many ways.

This is only a brief and very vague description of Radiant City, within the pages Davis creates a world that we all have visited, although perhaps not as literally as Matthew and Saida. But that darkness, that place of hopelessness and hope, is a place many writers glimpse from time to time. A place that the wise writer embraces. Davis embraced it and then some.

There are parts that speak directly to the reader, forcing you to look inside yourself, to remember thoughts and feelings long forgotten. Many bring tears to your eyes, one brought a little chuckle, as I remember doing and feeling something very similar as a child:

“He puts the book down with a stab of regret, as he sometimes does with inanimate objects. It is an old childhood fantasy that he has never been able to shake completely, that things have feelings and careless abandonment harms them. As a young boy, he cried at the thought of toys left rusting and lost in the woods, wept to think of their terrible, immobile loneliness. His weakness irritates him.” Page 135

And then there are the sections of darkness, where Davis beautifully, yet blatantly forces us to acknowledge what is within everyone, and how easily it could be brought out:

“You get down in the dark with dark things and you just do it, and then after a while it stops feeling weird. It starts feeling good because disciplining yourself to do these things means you can overcome everything, even yourself—your own sense of what’s right. Everything becomes possible then. There’s no line that can’t be crossed. At first you were afraid, see, that doing these things would mean you were a sick f***, but it takes almost no time to talk yourself into believing it doesn’t mean that at all, because you’re on the right team—the good guys. You can overcome anything, even yourself and every Sunday School lesson you’ve ever been taught, right? Because you have been turned into one tough motherf***er.” Jack to Matthew Page 311

Lauren B. Davis is an author whose writing will resonate in your mind long after you close the book and walk away. Her words haunt your dreams, your thoughts, and leave you feeling, as the cover blurb states, “The necessity of participating in life rather than simply observing it.”

A great Canadian writer that you should definitely check out.