Goblin rated Light From Uncommon Stars: 3 stars

Light From Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki
Good Omens meets The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet in this defiantly joyful adventure set in California's San …
Black lives matter Be gay do crimes ACAB
Pronouns: she/they
Living in occupied ancestral lands of the Osage nation (St. Louis, Missouri)
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Good Omens meets The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet in this defiantly joyful adventure set in California's San …
Good Omens meets The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet in this defiantly joyful adventure set in California's San …
It's a long novel but it didn't feel like it was wasting words. It's a few stories told at once about different people living in different places at different times. One thing that links the stories is none of the main characters are satisfied with the hand they were dealt in life, and the stories explore how they deal with that. Some threads (Constantinople) engaged me sooner than others (Argos), but by the end I was interested in everything, and it all came together in a satisfying way.
There also was some queer representation in the novel, and I like that sort of thing.
I decided it was finally time to read Catch-22 so I could get the cultural references that come up from time to time. I couldn't finish it.
In each chapter, we meet some odd characters with odd names that are probably supposed to make the reader laugh. We encounter some kind of circular logic. We have an absurd situation. And nothing really changes, and then we move onto the next chapter with new odd-named characters, new circular logic, new absurdities. 8 chapters into the book I skimmed through the chapter titles, which are nearly all odd character names, and realized it was likely going to be the same pattern again and again. The problem is that I wasn't entertained, and so in the middle of my 8th mission I decided that it just wasn't worth it and deserted. I won't make it to 42 missions.
Repetition to drive home a …
I decided it was finally time to read Catch-22 so I could get the cultural references that come up from time to time. I couldn't finish it.
In each chapter, we meet some odd characters with odd names that are probably supposed to make the reader laugh. We encounter some kind of circular logic. We have an absurd situation. And nothing really changes, and then we move onto the next chapter with new odd-named characters, new circular logic, new absurdities. 8 chapters into the book I skimmed through the chapter titles, which are nearly all odd character names, and realized it was likely going to be the same pattern again and again. The problem is that I wasn't entertained, and so in the middle of my 8th mission I decided that it just wasn't worth it and deserted. I won't make it to 42 missions.
Repetition to drive home a point can be very effective. It seems that a lot of people have been entertained by Heller's writing. I wasn't, so I couldn't deal with the monotony. Heller, I think, wanted to show us the absurdity of the military in a time when we were still feeling good about the military after WWII. It was a bold thing to do, and the success of the novel shows it was effective for a lot of people. I appreciate the idea behind the novel, the execution just didn't work for me at all.
Things that author Morgan Thomas does well: their prose is wonderful, they challenge us with flawed characters, and they color their stories with the history and character of the US South.
It's difficult for me to review an entire story collection so I'll focus on one of my favorites, "Bump". Louie, a trans woman, is so delighted to be asked if she's expecting a child by a coworker that she plays along, with the aid of the titular mail-order pregnancy bump. Louie, like all Morgan's flawed characters, makes choices I can't agree with but I still find her so relatable and love her so much. The author's painting of the intense yearning for something the body isn't capable of is so moving, and it's such a trans experience.
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