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Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki
Dec. 4th, 2021 03:24 pmLight from Uncommon Stars
3/5. Where do I even start? A transgirl teen runaway violin prodigy is taken in by a legendary violin instructor who has made a deal with the devil to deliver the souls of seven students, and she's six down. Meanwhile, the alien refugee family running a donut shop is having its own problems.
This swung from sublimely beautiful to cartoonishly silly enough that I got a bit disoriented. Parts of this book are going to be living in my head for a long time – for example, the part halfway through where ( spoiler ) Other parts left me squinting in bafflement. It's a gleeful smash of a book in which alien civilizations exist in the same story as literal hell, and predation and nurturing kindness come in the same person. I thought pieces of it were absolutely wonderful (pretty much everything about the transkid) and a lot of it left me cold. Too anime or something. I understand I'm in the minority there, but there you go.
I think my fundamental issue is that this book is setting out to write a hopeful story about a kind of person who doesn't generally get those kinds of stories. Excellent. But I'm a crusty old Slytherin cynic, and though I crave hope, you gotta sell me on it. And this book doesn't sell it so much as apply some donut sprinkles to it and stick it in your mouth. Not for me, thanks.
Content notes: Child abuse, transphobia, consensual sexwork, sexual assault, exploitation.
3/5. Where do I even start? A transgirl teen runaway violin prodigy is taken in by a legendary violin instructor who has made a deal with the devil to deliver the souls of seven students, and she's six down. Meanwhile, the alien refugee family running a donut shop is having its own problems.
This swung from sublimely beautiful to cartoonishly silly enough that I got a bit disoriented. Parts of this book are going to be living in my head for a long time – for example, the part halfway through where ( spoiler ) Other parts left me squinting in bafflement. It's a gleeful smash of a book in which alien civilizations exist in the same story as literal hell, and predation and nurturing kindness come in the same person. I thought pieces of it were absolutely wonderful (pretty much everything about the transkid) and a lot of it left me cold. Too anime or something. I understand I'm in the minority there, but there you go.
I think my fundamental issue is that this book is setting out to write a hopeful story about a kind of person who doesn't generally get those kinds of stories. Excellent. But I'm a crusty old Slytherin cynic, and though I crave hope, you gotta sell me on it. And this book doesn't sell it so much as apply some donut sprinkles to it and stick it in your mouth. Not for me, thanks.
Content notes: Child abuse, transphobia, consensual sexwork, sexual assault, exploitation.