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.
