Review:
Light from Uncommon Stars, by Ryka Aoki
Publisher: |
Tor |
Copyright: |
2021 |
ISBN: |
1-250-78907-9 |
Format: |
Kindle |
Pages: |
371 |
Katrina Nguyen is an young abused transgender woman. As the story opens,
she's preparing to run away from home. Her escape bag is packed with
meds, clothes, her papers, and her violin. The note she is leaving for
her parents says that she's going to San Francisco, a plausible lie. Her
actual destination is Los Angeles, specifically the San Gabriel Valley,
where a man she met at a queer youth conference said he'd give her a place
to sleep.
Shizuka Satomi is the Queen of Hell, the legendary uncompromising violin
teacher responsible for six previous superstars, at least within the
limited world of classical music. She's wealthy, abrasive, demanding, and
intimidating, and unbeknownst to the rest of the world she has made a
literal bargain with Hell. She has to deliver seven souls, seven violin
players who want something badly enough that they'll bargain with Hell to
get it. Six have already been delivered in spectacular fashion, but she's
running out of time to deliver the seventh before her own soul is forfeit.
Tamiko Grohl, an up-and-coming violinist from her native Los Angeles, will
hopefully be the seventh.
Lan Tran is a refugee and matriarch of a family who runs Starrgate Donut.
She and her family didn't flee another unstable or inhospitable country.
They fled the collapsing Galactic Empire, securing their travel
authorization by promising to set up a tourism attraction. Meanwhile,
she's careful to give cops free donuts and to keep their advanced
technology carefully concealed.
The opening of this book is unlikely to be a surprise in general shape.
Most readers would expect Katrina to end up as Satomi's student rather
than Tamiko, and indeed she does, although not before Katrina has a very
difficult time. Near the start of the novel, I thought "oh, this is going
to be hurt/comfort without a romantic relationship," and it is. But it
then goes beyond that start into a multifaceted story about complexity,
resilience, and how people support each other.
It is also a fantastic look at the nuance and intricacies of being or
supporting a transgender person, vividly illustrated by a story full of
characters the reader cares about and without the academic abstruseness
that often gets in the way. The problems with gender-blindness, the
limitations of honoring someone's gender without understanding how other
people do not, the trickiness of privilege, gender policing as a
distraction and alienation from the rest of one's life, the complications
of real human bodies and dysmorphia, the importance of listening to
another person rather than one's assumptions about how that person feels
it's all in here, flowing naturally from the story, specific to the
characters involved, and never belabored. I cannot express how
well-handled this is. It was a delight to read.
The other wonderful thing Aoki does is set Satomi up as the almost
supernaturally competent teacher who in a sense "rescues" Katrina, and
then invert the trope, showing the limits of Satomi's expertise, the
places where she desperately needs human connection for herself, and her
struggle to understand Katrina well enough to teach her at the level
Satomi expects of herself. Teaching is not one thing to everyone; it's
about listening, and Katrina is nothing like Satomi's other students.
This novel is full of people thinking they finally understand each other
and realizing there is still more depth that they had missed, and then
talking through the gap like adults.
As you can tell from any summary of this book, it's an odd genre mash-up.
The fantasy part is a classic "magician sells her soul to Hell" story;
there are a few twists, but it largely follows genre expectations. The
science fiction part involving Lan is unfortunately weaker and feels more
like a random assortment of borrowed
Star Trek tropes than coherent
world-building. Genre readers should not come to this story expecting a
well-thought-out science fiction universe or a serious attempt to
reconcile metaphysics between the fantasy and science fiction backgrounds.
It's a quirky assortment of parts that don't normally go together, defy
easy classification, and are often unexplained. I suspect this was
intentional on Aoki's part given how deeply this book is about the
experience of being transgender.
Of the three primary viewpoint characters, I thought Lan's perspective was
the weakest, and not just because of her somewhat generic SF background.
Aoki uses her as a way to talk about the refugee experience, describing
her as a woman who brings her family out of danger to build a new life.
This mostly works, but Lan has vastly more power and capabilities than a
refugee would normally have. Rather than the typical Asian refugee
experience in the San Gabriel valley, Lan is more akin to a US
multimillionaire who for some reason fled to Vietnam (relative to those
around her, Lan is arguably even more wealthy than that). This is also a
refugee experience, but it is an incredibly privileged one in a way that
partly undermines the role that she plays in the story.
Another false note bothered me more: I thought Tamiko was treated horribly
in this story. She plays a quite minor role, sidelined early in the novel
and appearing only briefly near the climax, and she's portrayed quite
negatively, but she's clearly hurting as deeply as the protagonists of
this novel. Aoki gives her a moment of redemption, but Tamiko gets
nothing from it. Unlike every other injured and abused character in this
story, no one is there for Tamiko and no one ever attempts to understand
her. I found that profoundly sad. She's not an admirable character, but
neither is Satomi at the start of the book. At least a gesture at a
future for Tamiko would have been appreciated.
Those two complaints aside, though, I could not put this book down. I was
able to predict the broad outline of the plot, but the specifics were so
good and so true to characters. Both the primary and supporting cast are
unique, unpredictable, and memorable.
Light from Uncommon Stars has a complex relationship with genre.
It is squarely in the speculative fiction genre; the plot would not work
without the fantasy and (more arguably) the science fiction elements.
Music is magical in a way that goes beyond what can be attributed to
metaphor and subjectivity. But it's also primarily character story deeply
rooted in the specific location of the San Gabriel valley east of Los
Angeles, full of vivid descriptions (particularly of food) and day-to-day
life. As with the fantasy and science fiction elements, Aoki does not try
to meld the genre elements into a coherent whole. She lets them sit side
by side and be awkward and charming and uneven and chaotic. If you're the
sort of SF reader who likes building a coherent theory of world-building
rules, you may have to turn that desire off to fully enjoy this book.
I thought this book was great. It's not flawless, but like its characters
it's not trying to be flawless. In places it is deeply insightful and
heartbreakingly emotional; in others, it's a glorious mess. It's full of
cooking and food, YouTube fame, the disappointments of replicators, video
game music, meet-cutes over donuts, found family, and classical music
drama. I wish we'd gotten way more about the violin repair shop and a bit
less warmed-over
Star Trek, but I also loved it exactly the way it
was. Definitely the best of the 2022 Hugo nominees that I've read so far.
Content warning for child abuse, rape, self-harm, and somewhat explicit
sex work. The start of the book is rather heavy and horrific, although
the author advertises fairly clearly (and accurately) that things will get
better.
Rating: 9 out of 10