Light From Uncommon Stars

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Lan Tran and her family run Starrgate Donut, but they too have a secret: Their doughnuts are replicated, not baked, and they are alien refugees from a galactic war.

I do, of course, also recommend checking out many other books by authors of Asian descent, be they Asian, Asian-Canadian, etc.

Musicians selling their souls to hell shouldn't fit in the same story as alien doughnut makers building a stargate, but somehow all these elements combine to create something wild and beautiful. We see Katrina’s desperation mount as she is ill-treated and harassed in Los Angeles, her adoptive city, and the unforgiving work she has to do to stay alive. I'll open the discussion with prompts in top-level comments, but others are welcome to add their own if they like! While not being trans myself, I have seen a few reviews praising the little details about Katrina’s experience, such as rationing her hormone supply and worrying about which bathroom to use.

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. Yeah, that one threw me at first—but it’s the secret to the incredible richness of Light from Uncommon Stars.But one day her tormentor, star football player Tyler Benson, takes things too far, leaving a threatening note in her locker, and gets suspended.

Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs. Despite all its dwelling on hell and the complex dynamics of karma, Light from Uncommon Stars is not a book about original sin, nor is it about an obsession that drives the course of one’s life. When Skye nails her audition, she’s immediately swept into a whirlwind of countless practices, shocking performances, and the drama that comes with reality TV.Aoki is imaginative about the aliens’ appearance, and about the circumstances that led to their fleeing their home planet, but every detail about their starship technology is an undisguised and unalloyed paean to Star Trek, with Aoki gleefully referencing the series by name several times throughout the novel. Soon Tara and Farah are bonding over chicken biryani, dancing to Bollywood Beats at midnight and kissing… against all the odds. Aoki has conjured the most spellbinding venues to unpack race, sexuality, and class with both ingenuity and heart.

The deeper Daya immerses herself into the world of roller derby, though, the more she realizes it’s not the simple physical pain-fest she was hoping for.Acclaimed literary essayist T Kira Madden’s raw and redemptive debut memoir is about coming of age and reckoning with desire as a queer, biracial teenager amidst the fierce contradictions of Boca Raton, Florida, a place where she found cult-like privilege, shocking racial disparities, rampant white-collar crime, and powerfully destructive standards of beauty hiding in plain sight. To do this, she coaches ambitious violin students, then offers them fame and renown in exchange for their souls. The tangle of political disputes and shadowy plots that leads to Kel and Lin crossing paths is not only thick enough to make the several hundred pages fly by, it will leave readers eager for a series full of twists and turns. In a review for Locus, Caren Gussoff praised the novel's portrayal of women and its use of speculative fiction tropes to explore the meaning of womanhood in the modern day.