Ryka Aoki's Light From Uncommon Stars
Look, if the marketing is going to say a book is “Good Omens meets Becky Chambers,” it has gotta be GREAT. Otherwise it cannot possibly live up to that! And this book was good, but not great. It just has a lot going on, and while I loved the characters and the general plot, the execution was kind of clumsy. First we have a trans teen runaway violin prodigy, and then there’s the woman who decides to take her on as a student, except really she has a deal with Hell and has to deliver a seventh student's soul or Hell gets her soul. And then there’s the teacher's love interest, the owner of a local donut shop, except really she is the captain (and mother) of a ship of interstellar refugees (honestly I was here for the donuts, and the AI daughter). So all of that plus the description made me think this would be light and sweet, and parts of it are, but a lot more parts deal with transphobia, homophobia, racism, sexual assault. There are SO MANY slurs in this book, just as a general content warning. I found a lot of it to be really upsetting. (I’d wager a lot of those experiences are realistic, but I read genre fiction to avoid realism.) The tone of this book was just all over the place and I still can’t decide how I feel about it. B/B+?
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A review copy was provided by the publisher. This book will be released in September.
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