Title: Light from Uncommon Stars
Author: Ryka Aoki
Publisher: Tor
Publication date: September 28, 2021
Length: 384 pages
Genre: Science fiction / fantasy
Source: Purchased
Rating:

A defiantly joyful adventure set in California’s San Gabriel Valley, with cursed violins, Faustian bargains, and queer alien courtship over fresh-made donuts.

Shizuka Satomi made a deal with the devil: to escape damnation, she must entice seven other violin prodigies to trade their souls for success. She has already delivered six. When Katrina Nguyen, a young transgender runaway, catches Shizuka’s ear with her wild talent, Shizuka can almost feel the curse lifting. She’s found her final candidate. But in a donut shop off a bustling highway in the San Gabriel Valley, Shizuka meets Lan Tran, retired starship captain, interstellar refugee, and mother of four. Shizuka doesn’t have time for crushes or coffee dates, what with her very soul on the line, but Lan’s kind smile and eyes like stars might just redefine a soul’s worth. And maybe something as small as a warm donut is powerful enough to break a curse as vast as the California coastline.

As the lives of these three women become entangled by chance and fate, a story of magic, identity, curses, and hope begins, and a family worth crossing the universe for is found.

Light from Uncommon Stars has been on my to-read shelf for a few years now, and even though I picked up a Kindle edition a while back, it’s taken me until now to finally read it. And while I sped through it and enjoyed the reading experience, my overall reaction is… mixed.

There is a lot going on in Light from Uncommon Stars. The three main characters are a transgender teen runaway, a violin teacher who made a deal with the devil many years earlier, and an alien starship captain hiding from intergalactic war in a donut shop. The characters come together in strange, quirky, and even touching circumstances, while also having individual challenges to overcome.

Katrina, the young runaway, is the most affecting of the characters. Escaping a cruel, abusive family and a world that judges and mistreats her, she has only her battered violin for comfort.

Yet, this student, this human being, had been forsaken not for ambition, nor revenge, nor even love, but for merely existing?

Who needs the Devil when people can create a hell like this themselves?

When Shizuka meets her in a park, she recognizes that Katrina may be the final protégé needed to fulfill her bargain — she needs to deliver one more soul to Hell in order to redeem her own soul. But as Shizuka starts to teach Katrina and provide her with a home, the protectiveness she feels for her student may prevent her from living up to the deal she’s made.

Meanwhile, Shizuka also meets Lan, the space-captain-turned-donut-shop-owner, and feels an unexpected connection — but Lan has her own family to protect and worry about as well, and can’t quite get why music is all that important to Shizuka.

There’s also a woman carrying out her family’s legacy of repairing violins, a nasty toad-like demon, Shizuka’s lovely housekeeper/confidante, and many, many more characters.

Light from Uncommon Stars has some important messages about belonging, kindness, fitting in, and treasuring one another. It recognizes that cruelty abounds in the world, yet beauty can still be found by those who are open to it.

The characters, especially Katrina, are quite special, and each of them is interesting in their own right, as well as in connection to one another. Again, Katrina’s journey is especially compelling, as she finally recognizes her own beauty in a world that tells her she doesn’t deserve it.

Her tonality had been honed by a lifetime of being concerned with her voice. Her fingerings were liquid, born of years of not wanting her hands to make ugly motions. And her ability to play to a crowd, project emotion, follow physical cues? Katrina had trained in that most of all.

The focus on music is where the book loses me along the way — there’s just so much about the composition and structure of violins, how they work, different pieces of music, composers, what the music means… honestly, it just doesn’t interest me that much, which meant that for big chunks of the book, I felt like an outsider looking in.

As I mentioned, there’s a LOT going on in this book… and for me, it was too much. Deals with the devil and extraterrestrials, cursed bows and spaceships? Plus, violin lessons and competitions and secrets of the violin-building trade? It’s all a bit messy, and doesn’t ever quite fully click into one coherent whole.

I do need to mention that the descriptions of the wide variety of food — Vietnamese, Mexican, Chinese — junk food and donuts and breads, and much, much more — is all mouth-watering and adds a richness to the characters’ experience that brings the Southern California setting to vivid life.

I expected to love this book — it’s gotten so much hype, and is blurbed by a bunch of authors I love, including T. J. Klune and John Scalzi, among others. I read the book quickly and felt absorbed enough to want to see how it would all work out… but taken as a whole, Light from Uncommon Stars was not the glorious reading experience I expected. Perhaps this just wasn’t the book for me. In any case, I’m glad to have read it, but couldn’t help feeling a bit let down.