Light From Uncommon Stars (Ryka Aoki)

Light From Uncommon Stars
Ryka Aoki
Tor
Fiction, Fantasy/Sci-Fi
****+ (Good/Great)

DESCRIPTION: In classical music circles, Shizuka Satomi is known as the Queen of Hell, a legendary violin instructor with a fearsome reputation. Six students she has trained, six stars who blazed brilliantly across stages around the world - six lives that ended tragically, but the true tragedy is one the public would never know. For Miss Satomi did not come by her name lightly. She sold her soul to Hell, and to buy her own freedom she has promised the demon Tremon Philippe seven tortured souls. She only needs one more student, one more soul, but not just anyone will do; the Queen of Hell does have a reputation to uphold, after all, and will only take on a true diamond in the rough. Yet with only a year before she defaults and Tremon claims her as the seventh and final prize for his master, she finally hears the sound she's been seeking, the violinist who will be her crowning achievement, in the most unlikely of places: beside a duck pond in a public park.
Katrina Nguyen fled an abusive home and parents who refused to understand who she really was, even smashing her violin and resorting to violence as they tried to force her to be their son "Michael" again. All she has is a backpack of essentials, an address of someone she met briefly at a convention, and a cheap eBay violin from China. But the San Gabriel Valley is not the sanctuary she'd hoped it would be. Running away again, lost and desperate, she turns, as always, to her music for comfort... and attracts the attention of a stranger. There's no way this woman can be who she says she is, and there's no way she could possibly want to train a nobody like Katrina, a nobody who only sees herself as a useless freak. There has to be a catch, doesn't there? But it's not like she has a choice, with nowhere else to go.
Captain Lan Tran fled with her family from the galactic wars ravaging her homeworld. On a quaintly backwards little planet whose inhabitants have barely begun exploring their own star system, Lan plans to hunker down and wait out the end of her people. To blend in, she buys an iconic donut shop, one whose landmark large rooftop donut will make a nice stargate (if she can figure out a power source that won't blow the grid on the entire coast), and sets her family/crew to work. She didn't mean to get attached to the simple locals or their odd customs. Little does she know just how deeply she and her family will become involved, the day Shizuka Satomi walks into Starrgate Donuts...

REVIEW: Aliens, classical music, Asian diaspora, hate, prejudice, damnation, and donuts... Light From Uncommon Stars is a song composed of many notes that one wouldn't think would harmonize, but do, even if it takes a while before the melody becomes clear. It took me a while (and one false start) before I managed to get far enough in for the characters and story threads to start coming together, and even then I was wondering just how on Earth it was going to work. It does this, in part, by not overexplaining or overanalyzing its premise, embracing its contradictions and peculiar mashup of ideas and characters. At the center of it all is the relationship between Shizuka Satomi, a woman who knowingly bargained away not only her own soul but the souls of six other men and women, and Katrina Nguyen, a trans teen who has endured all manner of dehumanization and abuse yet who finds a voice in her violin. The tale unfolds in the cultural stew of Monterey Park, where numerous immigrant cultures come together in unexpected ways (though not without friction), a peculiarly dynamic melding of tradition and innovation creating unique flavors, literally; food is a running theme through the book, from Lan's attempts to replicate home-baked donuts with interstellar technology to pizza restaurants that have morphed into Asian bistros to neighbors sharing the fruits of backyard gardens. Music, too, reflects the cultural blending and clashing, from classical masters to modern video game scores, and the universal power of music to shape emotion and evoke memory. As in most any story involving Hell and damnation, there is also pain and suffering and despair and heartbreak, not to mention a scheming demon who has no intention of being cheated out of the soul he was promised and who knows just how to play his human marks to get what he desires. While the plot sometimes feels slow and a few characters start to feel extraneous, it builds to something truly powerful and memorable by the finale, and I expect I'll be thinking about it for quite some time.

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