Light From Uncommon Stars

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Because Nozomi has a master plan of her own: one to show Willow she’s better than a stand-in, and turn their fauxmance into something real. But as the lies pile up, it’s not long before Nozomi’s schemes take a turn toward disaster…and maybe a chance at love she didn’t plan for. Her seamlessly wrought storytelling alchemy is buoyantly given extra vigour by characters who are as memorable as they are authentically, charmingly and sometimes heartbreakingly themselves. 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. A story that sparkles with magic and music and joy; this book just sings." - Everina Maxwell, author of Winter's Orbit By the light of her phone, Katrina applied concealer around her eye and to her cheek. It would be better not to face the world with visible bruises.

If you are an inveterate reader, the odds are good, better than good actually, that fellow readers or close friends (sometimes, happily, they are both) that at some point they will recommend a book to you. A book, they will assure you with a mix of solemnity and enthusiasm, is Continue Reading Ryka Aoki's prose is sublime, the emotional connections she makes are like sparkling jewels . . . Light From Uncommon Stars is fantastic, beautiful, and deeply, profoundly moving.”—Jenn Lyons, author of Ruin of KingsBy then, they had realized that they had put so much love into the shop, they had forgotten about having children to take over the business. Developers began to inquire. Some even offered a fair price. But Mrs. Thamavuong would look at their big donut and cry. Their entire lives were in that donut. Nineteen-year-old Tara Muvvala didn’t mean to lead a double life. But her bone-deep aversion to math + a soul-deep desire to please her mother = her failing math grade + exploding food vlog ‘this masala life’. Reading about the aliens’ group dynamics and growing pains is a pleasant diversion in the midst of the hell-driven plot, but the most compelling alien affair of them all is the tender, tentative love between Lan Tran and Shizuka. Aoki does a beautiful job of portraying falling in love at an older age, rendering Lan and Shizuka’s story with all the elation proper to love, but also nodding to the realism and sense of proportion that different priorities and an already-formed sense of self can impart to the experience. Shizuka’s priorities do not shift when she begins falling in love with Lan; she simply divides her time between her heavenly affair and her hellish one. Most often, however, we arrive at planets like this one … long forgotten after the Endplague has left them for dead. I played Handel. The survivors cried. They told me of the crimes they had committed. I told them of mine. Many were angry. More were ashamed. They asked, “Do we even have the right to hear this music? Is this okay?” But as I played, they listened. And slowly, their music welcomed them home. What did they find? Perhaps themselves. Perhaps each other—who am I to say? All I know is that I was not playing alone.”

As a child, Madden lived a life of extravagance, from her exclusive private school to her equestrian trophies and designer shoe-brand name. But under the surface was a wild instability. The only child of parents continually battling drug and alcohol addictions, Madden confronted her environment alone. Facing a culture of assault and objectification, she found lifelines in the desperately loving friendships of fatherless girls. If Maren is to have any hope of succeeding, she must become an apprentice to the Aromatory—the emperor’s mysterious dragon trainer. But Maren is unprepared for the dangerous secrets she uncovers: rumors of a lost prince, a brewing rebellion, and a prophecy that threatens to shatter the empire itself. Not to mention the strange dreams she’s been having about a beast deep underground… El Monte Donuts became known not only for apple fritters, but for Pac-Man, Asteroids, and Defender. Their most popular game, by far, was Stargate. Dedicated video game players would spend hour after hour, quarter after quarter, rescuing people from an alien invasion that would never, ever cease. Eventually, the Thamavuongs decided to buy, rather than rent, first one, then two, and finally three Stargate machines. Since they kept them in good playing condition, their shop became known informally as Stargate Donuts.Delightful and heartbreaking. An unexpected mashup of science fiction and fantasy that will make you love music, crave donuts, and wish to read it all again.”—John Scalzi, New York Times bestselling author I’ve also seen it noted that Light from Uncommon Stars is a great tribute to the violin and an accurate portrayal of the overall violin community, focusing on the racism (Shizuka is heralded as one of the greatest teachers, but Katrina’s Chinese violin is sneered at), sexism (Lucia runs the family violin repair shop, but she was never properly taught because it’s “not for little girls”), and elitism (Katrina has had no formal training, and she prefers to play video game music than anything classical). But the world is full of wonders: infernal pacts and dazzling illusions, lost ghosts and elemental mysteries. In all paper is fire, and Jordan can burn the cut paper heart out of a man. She just has to learn how.

Shizuka Satomi has sent the souls of six of her students to hell, choosing them carefully, training them as violinists, and then letting them play with her special, cursed dogwood bow so that their souls are consigned to damnation. When she hears teenager Katrina Nguyen playing in the park, she recognizes something in the girl’s playing: she’s far from being a virtuoso right now, but she has an instinct that can’t be taught. Shizuka takes her on as a student with every intention of feeding her soul to the devil in exchange for Shizuka’s own. Catalin Matía would smile whenever someone described great music as divine. To him, that was nonsense. Great music is all about weakness, uncertainty, mortality—what does Heaven know of these?” Vanessa Armstrong Horror Film It Follows to Get a Sequel, Reasonably Titled They Follow 5 hours ago I’ve been working on a solution to that,” Lan said. “For now, continue fabrication and low-power tests. You may also divert ten percent of the ship’s power when we are not running the replicator.” Aoki's novel is an exciting, wild web of an adventure, an unputdownable book about music, found family, and identity. Diving into the tough subjects, Aoki's book emerges with a joyful, queer, radical ballad of a story. . .”— Booklist, starred review

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Still, should your civilization survive, it will eventually find the same equation. And that will be your death sentence. For in that equation, there will be no forever, no eternity. Nothing. Lan’s family turns its attention to their donut shop within minutes of a literal earth-shattering moment, and throughout the novel, are as preoccupied with working on their stargate as they are with perfecting their donuts. Letting it end there would be tragic. So, with the help of his best friends, the comfort of his haikus and lists, and even strange, surreal appearances by his hero, Oscar Wilde, Ken will find that love is worth more than the price of heartbreak.The Thamavuongs spent three weeks with Lan and her family to teach them their basic operations and how to run their equipment. Then they handed their treasured recipe book and keys to Ms. Tran and retired, full of good memories and good American currency, to Laos and their beloved Vientiane. We don’t hear a great deal about Tremon Philippe, but we may nonetheless find ourselves wanting to know still less about him—his gastronomical adventures, shady business ventures, and especially his prejudices. Tremon does not like East Asian people, barring a soft spot for Shizuka. Making the novel’s demon a stodgy, dress-shoe-wearing, mouth-breathing racist is one of Aoki’s many attempts to cast light on the banality of evil, and there is a smattering of wry commentary throughout the novel on the kind of racism levelled against East Asians. One fateful night, she follows reports of a white wolf into the woods, and she comes across the unexpected: her childhood crush, Tam Lang, battling a horse demon in the woods. As a werewolf, Tam has been wandering from place to place for years, unable to call any town home. If I haven’t said as much about the third protagonist, Lan Tran (the galactic traveler who now owns a donut shop on earth but can’t get good donuts out of her replicator because the ingredient that’s missing is love), or the violin shop owner Lucy Matia whose arc is about changing her own understanding of how violins are made and maintained and what her place in that world is, it’s not because I didn’t care about those guys. It’s just because I melted all the way into Katrina and Shizuka’s relationship, how these two people enter into it with the matter-of-fact assumption that Shizuka will do harm to Katrina and it’s just a question of how much harm and when, and then the way it shifts not just into Shizuka loving Katrina like a daughter, but into Katrina stepping up to protect and care for Shizuka as well.