Note: I write this review while listening to Béla Bartók’s “Sonata for Solo Violin.” No disrespect to the other orchestra sections but strings are the best ones.
Light from Uncommon Stars has three protagonists: a teenage violinist, a grown adult violinist who can buy her soul back from Hell by giving it seven souls of younger violinists (her students), and a donut shop proprietor who is actually an alien on the run from galactic warfare. As that description indicates, this is a book that unapologetically blends genres, a fantasy novel that’s a sci-fi novel that’s actually really a novel about saving our lives through music, food, and human connection. Insofar as it reminds me of anything, it reminds me of Martin Millar: Aoki gives her world the same sharp edges that Millar’s worlds have, and like his books, Aoki’s is about wresting a happy ending out of chaos.
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.
As the two get to know each other, as they spend their days together, as Shizuka begins to understand the large and small traumas that have shaped Katrina’s life so far, they form a true bond. At times you worry that it’s an unhealthy bond, that Katrina is too willing to give herself away to the first person in — maybe ever? — who shows her kindness, who fully accepts her gender identity, who cares for her like you do for a child but respects her like a fellow adult. Even as you’re worried about Katrina, there’s still such a sense of respite. The book begins with her running away from home, her father having physically abused her for being trans, and she’s staying with a friend who turns out not to be one, while engaging in survival sex work to get by. It’s rough going, and you can see why Katrina’s ready to take any port in a storm.
Of course, I understood there was no chance that Shizuka was going to consign Katrina’s soul to hell. It is very much not that kind of book. I knew that the trajectory of the book was going to ensure that Shizuka and the other characters would take good care of Katrina. (Would love to get that kid into trauma-focused therapy btw.) And they do, of course. Better yet, they foster her career with affection and respect, and Shizuka follows Katrina’s lead in their teacher/student relationship, helping her play video game theme music when she’s feeling it and Bartók when she’s feeling that. The point in either case isn’t for Katrina to play this piece or that piece, but rather to be connected to her work.
That sense of connection is particularly important for Shizuka to foster in her student, because she herself has faced such an intense alienation from her own music. Her deal with hell meant that all trace of her career as a performer has been wiped. No record remains of her talent. Among the many things Aoki does well is to truly make the reader feel the ways in which music intertwines itself with the characters’ lives and emotions. This is very helpful to me, a non-musician, and it made me want to ask Aoki a ton of questions about her own musical background.
With Katrina, Shizuka used what had always worked: let her listen, let her follow…. Just play and trust her to follow.
Initially Shizuka had assumed this process was to compensate for a lack of training. Yet Shizuka quickly realized that, although it differed from her previous students, Katrina was far from untrained.
Her tonality had been honed by a lifetime of being concerned with her voice. Her fingerings were liquid, born of years of not wanting her hands to make ugly motions. And her ability to play to a crowd, project emotion, follow physical cues?
Katrina had trained in that most of all.
So, of course, I wanted the book to end with Katrina being safe and cared for with the tenderness and interest that every kid deserves. What I didn’t expect was how emotional I would feel about Shizuka getting saved and taken care of. Because Light from Uncommon Stars understands something about generosity that I rarely see reflected in fiction, perhaps because it’s hard to articulate (I am struggling to articulate it right now). Receiving generosity is great, and it’s important to Katrina to be given new clothes, and money, and a safe place to sleep, and the repair of her violin. Katrina has not had the experience of receiving generosity from people. But she also hasn’t been in a position to dispense generosity, and Aoki understands that this, too, has been a lack. As she shifts out of survival mode for the first time maybe ever, Katrina possesses the resources to give help, and because she is a good girl, that’s exactly what she does. Your correspondent got pretty emoshe about it.
(I still don’t feel like I’ve articulated the thing I want to say about generosity, dammit. It’s that being able to help others is its own kind of need? And when that need goes unfulfilled, it sucks? And that is why kids with trauma backgrounds often say they want to grow up to work in a job where they can help other kids like them.)
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.
Ryka Aoki’s previous books came out from small publishers, which, yay for small publishers!, but it’s also awesome to see her at the start of what I hope is a long and prominent SFF career with Tor. I would like please for her to send me a list of The Best Violin Performances for a Lady Who Doesn’t Know Anything about Music (full disclosure, it’s me) to Listen to on YouTube; because she really made me feel things about violins.