Hugos 2022: Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki

Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki

A fifth of the way into this book, I was fairly uncertain about it. On the one hand, there was some charming, amusing stuff: a family of aliens gone undercover on Earth as owners of a doughnut shop, picked because they were using the giant doughnut on the roof to build a stargate. On the other hand, there was some harrowing stuff: around the one-fifth mark there's a sexual assault of a teenage girl, which she just kind of shrugs off as the kind of thing that has to happen to her because she's trans. The mix of tones felt very off to me, and I wasn't convinced it was being pulled off successfully. Did I want harsh transphobia in my cute book about doughnut-making aliens?

Originally published: 2021
Acquired and read: July 2022

But by the two-fifth mark, I was totally into it. Once I adjusted to what Ryka Aoki was doing here, I was captivated by it. Light from Uncommon Stars is a great book about people confronting the histories that pull them down, both personal and family, and managing to forge new ones. The main character is a would-be violinist, and she comes into the orbit of a violin instructor who has promised to deliver the souls of nine promising violin students into hell so that she can obtain musical greatness for herself. Only unlike all her previous students, this one's greatest aspiration is to stream performances of videogame and anime music on YouTube! Aoki's depiction of a found home amidst the problems of transphobia is effective and charming; watching the "Queen of Hell" decide that if this girl is going to play anime music, she is going to be the best at it, is very effective. I often bounce off writing about music, but Aoki's, well, sings. I enjoyed reading about violin refurbishers, and the climax, where she carries us through someone's performance of a solo violin sonata, is incredibly effective. There are good twists and reversals in the plot and characters, and neat connections drawn, and the music works both as a metaphor for other things and as music in itself.

This was the last of the 2022 Hugo finalists that I read, because it didn't come out in paperback until just two weeks before the voting deadline. Sometimes I feel like each Hugo finalist is weaker than the one before it, and suspect that's because by the end of three months of non-stop Hugo reading, I'm burning out on the whole process, but then I read a book like this and realize it's not me, it's the books. This was the very last book I read, and it was my favorite of all them.