Luca by Or Luca
I would like to thank Francesca from Luna for an advance copy of this novella in exchange for a fair and honest review
Publisher – Luna Press
Published – 8/2
Price - £7.99 paperback £3.19 Kindle eBook
Two young women live in the same city in the Middle East; Luca is drowning, while Dani is slowly being lifted off the ground.
Luca is rapidly spiralling into a heavy depression that no one but her can see. Alongside Luca's descent, Dani is trying to find her place in the world. She has the unusual ability to see other people's emotions.
Fortunately for Luca, Dani's ability isn't just an inconvenience; it might also be a gift.
CW: Self-harm
Exploring mental health or disability issues in science fiction is always tricky. It is dangerous to just think thanks to a wave of your hand everything can be fixed. That would be an unrealistic outcome and as dangerous undertones of how we see people with those issues that are being faced ona daily basis. However what fantasy can do is explore the issues in different ways and can let the reader experience the feelings and complexities of the daily struggles mental health can bring in an engaging and powerful way. In Or Luca’s novella Luca we get a very powerful yet personal tale of mental health and survival.
Luca is struggling with life every day, getting out of bed is hard and her new therapist feels inadequate to the task. She is only happiest driving her bike across the city of Telo at full speed getting faster and faster when she can only feel free. She begins to experience a strange enveloping of water around her body. This pulls her further and further into her depression and cutting her off from the world. Dani has arrived back in Telo and has no clue at all as to her next steps in life. Fr her staying in her friend’s apartment feels the best idea but he would much prefer she soon leaves and not just stays inside just watching the television. It looks like staying with her strange grandmother may be the only way out and although she learns the power of story that she also starts to realise she may have a talent for seeing people differently.
Luca is a fascinating yet tough read. Upfront I will say this tale deals with self-harm and thoughts of suicide however it very much is exploring the impact of a bad mental health period but also the importance of therapy. Luca and Dani’s story is not the tale of two damaged women facing each other by falling in love. Instead, it’s about the two journeys these very different characters go and the choices they each make that have consequences.
Luca’s scenes are the darker parts of the story, as her new condition arrives we see a woman who is literally starting to feel like she is drowning every day and takes ever more dangerous attempts to make herself feel something. A really powerful metaphor used very effectively and the writing makes us see clearly that this isn’t someone just ‘feeling down’ instead it’s a huge emotional cost to Luca every hour and every day and if you feel that cut off from the world then eventually all your ties to life start to fray. We get to experience her painful therapy sessions with her often silent and unreadable therapist, she nicknames Miss Porcelain is a daily trial. In Dani’s case we have a much lighter joyous character but one we realise hates the idea of committing to anything and unclear on exactly what her talent of seeing people as they are and how they could be; will lead to.
What Luca as a novella interrogates is the importance of story to our humanity. The idea that we can transform ourselves or see ourselves as different people. Sometimes a change is to be feared and sometimes a change to be embraced. It is refreshing to have a tale where communication is important be it Dani plucking up the courage to go a date with a woman she has only just met or Luca to actually share what she is feeling. When you do realise how the stories intersect it’s a realisation that only both character’s journeys allowed this and also that some events we were reading from one person’s perspective may read differently in another’s.
Luca is a thoughtful and entrancing story that doesn’t sugar coat mental health issues and yet uses magical realism to share the worldview of the characters to encourage empathy and understanding. A dark tale but one that does say there can be a way through with support. I was really impressed with it and will be watching out for future tales from Or Luca in the future.
