Light From Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki

3 out of 5

"𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘭𝘥 𝘪𝘴 𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘪𝘯𝘨, 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘬𝘯𝘰𝘸. 𝘈 𝘱𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘢𝘳𝘦𝘯’𝘵 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘺 𝘵𝘰 𝘭𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘪𝘯 𝘪𝘵."

I'm having such a hard time articulating how I feel about this book. There was SO many good, solid parts about this story. The bare bones were excellent, and so was the writing. But it was also extremely disappointing for those same reasons - because it had so many wonderful things, I'm disappointed that I didn't love it more.

The whole storyline revolving around the aliens was extremely random, disjointed, and did not feel like it fit within the story about Katrina and Satomi. If they really wanted Satomi to have a relationship, Lan could've still been that as a human. Lan's family also provided a lot of plot convenience. It felt like the author had 50 ideas and messages she was trying to portray in under 400 pages, which left many of the side stories unfinished.

What I did really love was the family that Satomi, Katrina, and even Astrid found within each other. It was obvious that Katrina had been saved by Satomi, but it wasn't so obvious that Satomi had also been saved by Katrina. I also adored how the author uses music to explain things like gender, judgement, and life in general. The part that stuck out to me the most was when she explained how people live life in "sections", like sections of music, and when a section doesn't go how they expect it, things can go off the rails.

Please don't take the negative parts of my review as a reason not to read this book. While there are very realistic parts involving hateful things people say about trans people, and there are definitely parts I liked more than others, there is also trans joy and familial love and many good, amazing things to gain from reading this story.


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