Review: Light from Uncommon Stars

Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

First off, I have to be honest: I ordered this book, and got it from the library, weeks before the shooting at the Lunar New Year festivities in Monterey Park, CA, where this book largely takes place. Reading it only after the shooting was quite surreal, as was the fact that after I finished the book, I went and watched the movie Tár and saw a lot of strong parallels between the Queen of Hell and Lydia Tár herself - prodigious musical instructors with tendencies to leave a lot of devastation in their wake, with suicides among both their ranks of protégées. 

I think I’d been putting off reading this book for a while too, and I’m not sure why. It seemed to get a lot of acclaim, including a Hugo nomination, but I just never picked it up until now. Why, I still couldn’t tell you. I’ll say this much, though: the book was quite a mixed bag. On the one hand, it’s very good to see a book with such a diverse cast of characters, set in a diversely populated locale like the San Gabriel Valley. Monterey Park is the main setting, but other towns in the area get name dropped as well, and the pan-Asian representation (the human leads are of Vietnamese and Japanese descent, and the extraterrestrial lead has a Vietnamese cover identity) is always welcome to see. 

On the other hand, this book has two major flaws for me. One is that, while it doesn’t shy away from social issues - Katrina in particular unfortunately witnesses a lot of racism, including anti-Asian BS from the white guy who offers her a room at his place (and is quite unhygienic, dirty of body as well of soul, and seems to think he can get away with offensive jokes because he’s a gay vegan), a lot of transphobic aggressions both micro and macro, and some humiliating hookups for money - it also severely clashes with the book’s overall tone. It’s like, the comparison to Becky Chambers is there, LGBTQ+ friendly sci fi comfort food (helps that one of the main settings is a donut shop whose signature menu item, the Alaska Donut, is too big for any one person to eat alone), but the gritty thematic elements don’t work well with it. (I was especially concerned for Katrina having had to turn to sex work to survive - there’s a scene where she’s stripping on cam for paying customers online, and while Aoki doesn’t reveal her age, it’s implied Katrina is still a minor.) 

Then there’s the storyline - or, more accurately, the two storylines. Satomi, the Queen of Hell, is the common link between the two, as the violin teacher trying to entice Katrina into a Faustian bargain and the love interest to Lan Tran, the donut shop proprietor who used to captain a starship. These really are two different books spliced together, and try as Aoki might, it doesn’t work well enough to justify the genre mashup for me. Honestly, I would’ve liked it better if perhaps Satomi would’ve been a violin teacher not trying to pass the devil’s buck, and had fallen in love with Lan. Or, say, if Katrina had been the main protagonist opposite Satomi the villain protagonist, without the space opera elements. But blending the two was definitely to this novel’s detriment for me. 

Well, hopefully Aoki will write a book that’ll impress me in the future. This one wasn’t for me, but I can see where she shines as a writer.

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