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Radiant: The Dancer, The Scientist, and a Friendship Forged in Light
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50
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
32/100Critics
67/100Scholars
Author:
Liz Heinecke
Publisher:
Grand Central Publishing
Date:
February 16, 2021
A dual biography of the turn-of-the-century friendship between two groundbreaking women: scientist Marie Curie and Loie Fuller, an American performance artist who dreamed of using Curie's insights into radium to create dazzling stage productions.
What The Reviewers Say
... [an] imaginative and immersive dual biography.
... Heinecke has captured their lives, their times, and their friendship in a beautifully crafted work of creative nonfiction as gripping as any novel of Belle Epoch Paris.
Radiant doesn’t do this promising material justice. The approach is bold, using imaginary dialogue and inner thoughts to flesh out the women’s stories, but the narrative tone flips uneasily between novelistic dramatization and biographical info-dumping. Too often, major life events are told as backstory rather than portrayed as lived experiences. In a dramatized documentary film, we know when we’re seeing an actor and when we’re hearing a commentator. In Radiant that’s hard to tell, and this makes the book difficult to engage with..
Heinecke, previously an author of science books for kids, draws on her art and science degrees in this vividly elucidating and enthralling double portrait which reads like a biographical novel rather than a dual biography as she boldly imagines the thoughts and feelings of her two magnetic subjects and invents dialogue. Some readers may object to these creative-nonfiction techniques, but extensive bibliographic notes attest to the factual foundation supporting this irresistible, dramatic, many-faceted, and, yes, illuminating tale of two extraordinary geniuses and their friendship. Heinecke’s fresh take on Curie is welcome, and her portrayal of the too-little-known Fuller is revelatory..
