Light From Uncommon Stars

Beautiful, poignant, and heart-rending. I didn't expect it to be so original and surprising at the outset, but it was.

LGBTQ+ realistic and positive

Finished this book in about a week. I've heard of Ryka Aoki before but I did not know she was trans, so I was even more hyped to read this book and learn more about her. The writing level is appropriate for something oriented at the YA audience, especially with how it drops pop culture references (lmao Lindsey Stirling, Sword Art Online, and totally-not-undertale) and reaches to the occult and sci-fi. It was easy to breeze through.

I enjoyed the world building and character building a lot for those at the center of the stage, the food is given a lot of care 🤤, it really took the story forward from the start. You start to get draw into the cadence of their life. While the ending felt like what I thought was sufficient for a YA novel, I was disappointed how some characters really did not get their justice/recognition. There are times that this book feels like a typical YA novel and I wish it said more, but there are other times I remember how important it is that it's doing exactly what it's doing (I say as a queer trans Asian person myself). Just... maybe for someone younger than me (in my 20s)?

As others mentioned, this book could use some content warnings on the traumatic experiences that the main character especially experiences. I also noticed that aspects about inter-Asian discourse aren't really touched on: there's a celebration of primarily East and Southeast Asian cultures, not really a mention of many other cultures like South Asian or issues of colorism.

A book driven by its characters. I think it would be hard not to empathise with Katrina. The momentum keeps going and you want it to keep going for the characters. Leap of faith in the storyline, no problem, I want this to happen for them.

Written with the narrators view it was able to weave the stories of several people together, but with a strong emphasis on a couple of characters. The narration was also used to skip some of the exacting detail about Katrina's early life while explaining it. For sure a content warning for some of that though.

I can't remember the last time I read a novel that I felt so much. I love the characters, particularly the three central women, I love the story, wild though it is, I love the descriptions, and I love the ending. I felt invested in the characters' lives, particularly Katrina's, in a way I rarely do.

I'm not sure I can unequivocally recommend it, though. Ryka Aoki doesn't shy away from showing how hard Katrina's life is. The first few chapters are particularly tough going, but even when things pick up for her, it's still not all beer and skittles. Not sure I could provide a definitive list of CWs, but transphobia and sexual assault would have to be in there.

From the blurb, this book promises ‘cursed violins, Faustian bargains, and queer alien courtship over fresh-made donuts’. Ideally, you should be interested in some or most of those things in order to truly get the most out of this book. The premise and cover sealed the deal for me, and I was quite curious about how the bargain would play out. While I don’t think I quite matched the author’s ideal audience, I did like some parts of the novel. There is a lot here about found family, identity, and hope for a better future.

The first part of the novel was its most enticing, since it brings the setup and introduces our main characters. We’ve got one character involved in a rather brutal bargain with a demon and another who is a trans runaway just trying to make it through each day. How can one not find that interesting and compelling? On top of it all, we’ve got a single mother trying to raise her kids on an alien planet—the parallels are hardly subtle, but it works—all while managing a donut shop somewhere in California. (I’m not really familiar at all with where San Gabriel is supposed to be.) But then much of the novel is spent on dialogue between the characters or expanding on their relationships, which is engaging enough, but gets dry and dull after a while. I wanted to hear more about the mechanics of the bargain, or violin practice, or the struggles of being a small business owner. Instead, we get a lot of positive and upbeat mottoes and cute characters doing cute things while the plot is forced onwards through off-screen mechanisms. The ending felt rather convenient and not as clever as I was expecting.

I did enjoy meeting the characters, and especially Katrina Nguyen, our main character who happens to be a violin genius. Her meeting Shizuka is truly a game changer—for the first time, she has someone who respects her just as she is, and not only that, but provides her luxury and violin lessons. All of that—and for free. Of course, the stakes implied by the premise are the hellish bargain, but at no point do the stakes truly feel threatening; the atmosphere of the book is so saccharine that you sense no harm could come to the characters. Moreover, Shizuka Satomi seemed an interesting character from the premise, but the author doesn’t delve into her backstory until the final third or so of the book, and I could have used more reasons to care about her. Her relationship with Lan Tran is also one of those ‘aw, how sweet’ things in the book, but we get a lot of telling and not showing—so the relationship didn’t feel as genuine as it probably should have. There are also some minor characters who have a surprising amount of depth to them, but their narratives almost feel like an afterthought while the main plot trudges along as we know it must.

Some frustrations are unique to me as a reader. I have little love or understanding of California, so a lot of the California-specific nostalgia didn’t have an emotional attachment for me. In some ways, this book seems like a very specific work borne out of the author’s experiences—for it must be, to be so specific and express such longing for specific places and circumstances. Yet, if you aren’t overly familiar with these, for instance, playing the violin or the competitiveness of the classical music world, a lot of this might go over your head. At least it did mine. I didn’t get much of an excitement about the violin—I pushed past the terms that confused me or the implications about certain pieces, because looking everything up would take me away from the story even further. That said, Aoki does have some fantastic descriptions for some of the pieces.

The writing style and perspective was also rather experimental in style. There were a handful of sentences that I had to read over and over because they just didn’t make any sense, or were otherwise too purple in prose. For instance: ‘And here and now is not a bad place and time to be, especially when so much of the unknown is beautiful.’ Sounds lovely and deep, but lacks substance—kind of like a donut, I guess. There were constant shifts of perspective—kind of like a TV show, where you see the same event from the eyes of different characters, except this was in written form. There would be a few short paragraphs, and then a larger break, and then a brand new set of paragraphs from another character. It felt like a whirlwind, and not in a good way. At times the author also writes out the current character’s thoughts, or a flashback, or some kind of dream, and it is never clear what one should expect when that happens. I also noticed a few editing mistakes—the wrong character’s name mixed up with the correct one, or characters referencing things the narrative mentions earlier in the novel—but not within that character’s presence. (I remember one instance of Shizuka referencing a specific event that was brought up with two completely unrelated characters—how convenient of her to reference something she wasn’t even present for, just a few pages later!)

Although this book fell flat for me in some ways, I definitely had things I appreciated, too. For one, the found family vibes in this book are immaculate. References to the game Undertale also made me smile. Saccharine or not, it’s hard to resist a smile when you see Katrina blossom into herself as she finds true acceptance, respect, and encouragement from her found family. Ditto for Lan Tran and the other characters, without going too much into detail. This is perhaps the greatest strength of the book; it creates an atmosphere of such belonging, such raw acceptance, that any reader who can empathize with our characters’ struggles is sure to feel seen and heard, at least for a time. Even if they don’t know much about violins, classical music, or California, there is at least that. Finally, kudos to this book for making me hanker for a good donut—and thereby discovering that there is an amazing mom-and-pop donut shop near me owned by a friendly Asian family.

I'm not into classical music, I don't like doughnuts, I had trouble with some of the sci-fi elements that were just there and didn't have any implications beyond the familial relationships.

How does a universe work where both hell and multiverse traveling aliens both exist?

Why did the captain have to be the partner of the empyreal fleet commander?

Why did she have to be the inventor of a new AI technology?

How did this impact anything beyond a couple of arguments with her children?

I do like stories that deal with the struggles of LGBTQ people, and somehow it all came together to a satisfactory conclusion.

Not sure what I think. Did I enjoy it? Sorta. I did finish it, so that's something.

Not a spoiler per se, but the end lacked oomph. It builds and builds and builds then petered out into "everything was fine."

this had its moments i guess but i have read better-written things on ao3 and i got extremely tired of "cozy scene where loveable misfit main character eats food with found family". any drama introduced is resolved within a few pages and you always know exactly what is going to happen and that everyone will be fine, and the attempt at humorous pop-culture aware plot (especially at the end) is just very cringe

What a bizarre book. The mix of tones and genres is really jarring. We have a surreal mishmash of demonic, space opera, donuts... but also abuse, transphobia, racism. It also does this strange thing, where it switches viewpoint characters multiple times a page in the middle of a conversation, that I never quite knew what to make of. Overall this book is extremely readable, it drew me in completely. I'm not entirely sure what to make of it, but I definitely enjoyed it.

I'm not sure how to describe this but it was lovely.