Despite her hopes, Evan turns out to be indifferent to her existence, and he tells her to come back later. She runs away in the dead of night, taking her beloved violin with her, and tries to start a new life with her friend Evan. The story begins with Katrina Nguyen, a young Asian/Latina trans woman on the run from her abusive parents.

The plot is so crowded that, as with Build Your House Around My Body, I thought it would be best to go by character. The writing is secondary, however, to my main problem, which is that this book is way too busy. Whatever I may think of her book, Aoki is clearly a musician. (The inclusion of Lindsey Stirling, no matter how tangentially, was an excellent choice.) The writing is irritating – all the stuttering the characters do gets really old really fast, as does the constant repetition of the characters’ full names, and I think both could have been handled differently – but it tends to shine when Aoki is talking about music. It is a beautiful mess with endearing characters and clear references to real-time Millennial music culture. Light from Uncommon Stars is a ball of jumbled storylines revolving around aliens, Hell, queer identity, and classical music. I wanted to love it and mostly did like it, but, as seems to be my most common refrain these days, it didn’t blow me away. Thus we come to Light from Uncommon Stars, for which I have extremely mixed feelings. Some reviews, though, take more time, either because the stories are more complex or my thoughts are more tangled, or both. Ariadne was easy, and in fact might have been the fastest review I’ve ever written, because I was so disappointed that my thoughts hopped onto the screen themselves with minimal interference from me. Some reviews come easier than others, and I don’t know why.

Light from uncommon stars reviews