Mini-Review: Light From Uncommon Stars

An 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.

~ Goodreads ~ Storygraph ~

My rating: 3.5/5 stars

This book was hyped up so much and while I fell in love with it when I started reading, unfortunately, the spell didn’t last.

We start with getting to know the characters – Shizuka, Katrina and Lan – their lives and where they live. I buddy read this with Sonali and she and I both fell in love with the writing. Aoki’s writing style is hauntingly lyrical and can make the most mundane string of words sound beautiful. While I’m no musician I was able to keep up with the narrative and truly experience the fascination and the pull of the violin.

However, after about the first 30 to 40%, the book started to get extremely technical. I loved the edition of Lucia in the book, even though all she could talk about were the technicalities of violin, I thought she added an important perspective to the narrative and I truly enjoyed her story. But after a while the musical details became a hindrance to my reading experience and I started skimming through. I feel like the average reader with no knowledge of violin and classical music (me) would get a bit lost from time to time which is really a pity.

Another one of my issues was with the tone of Hell in this book. Shizuka Satomi has delivered six souls to hell and with a seventh one (Katrina), her soul will be set free. This is the central plot point of the book. The more we get to know about Shizuka the more we realise that she may appear to be the Queen of Hell but she is kind-hearted on the inside. But it became so difficult to put together the images of the kind and nurturing Shizuka who took Katrina under her wing and defended her versus the Shizuka who was quite ready and eager to sacrifice Katrina to the demon. Yes, her feelings change and waver over time but the point is this makes us take Hell so lightly.
The characters’ attitude towards discovering the hell bond and trading of demons is so bizarre at some point you would think people in LA just always go about trading souls to to demons. What with the characters switching opinions on the morality of this deal in seconds and the casual way it is presented, I couldn’t be serious about it at all. Up until the very end, I truly couldn’t believe that breaking the bond might even have any consequences.

You know, apart from these issues I love the different themes the book picked up on – trans lives, found families, the power of art and music, morality and immorality, artificial code and how human can they be, feminism, love and family and so many more. I don’t talk much about Lan and her family in this review but I adored them. They had such a fun and interesting dynamic going on and whenever we got to the donut shop I would have a blast reading about them. I was worried at some point whether all these narratives would get tied together by the end but thankfully the ending was brilliant. The author ended on a high note(pun intended) and I love how everything was wrapped up.

Sadly, I did not enjoy the climax as much because the technical musical descriptions yet again interfered with my immersion.

Overall, this was a good book, just not incredible for me.

Have you read Light from Uncommon Stars? If so, what are your thoughts on it?

What are some queer sci-fi books you enjoyed reading?

Do you like reading books centred around music?