4.5 stars!
It is testament to Ryka Aoki's craft that the disparate elements of this fantastic story add up to be more than their constituent parts.
On the face of it, runaway transgender violin prodigies, space aliens refugees escaping an Empire consuming plague of despair to run a heritage donut shop, a violin prodigy turned elite teacher who has sold her soul in a pact with a devious demon, a luthier who cannot inherit the family business on account of being the wrong sex and a smattering of queer/trans romance leavened with Asian food fetishes (yum) just should not work.
But it does and triumphantly so.
The mixture of science fiction elements (stargates, blasters, memory wipes, an AI daughter and food replicators) with fantasy elements (demons, cursed violin bows and the sacrifice of souls for fleeting temporal fame) saturates itself with humanity, hope and more than a bit of love and affection.
Katrina Nguyen's journey is primarily an uplifting one. There are terrors along the way, but they can be overcome, and the very fact can drag others along with them. Maybe it is not so strange to posit that music can asuage the despair of insignificance?
A finalist for the 2022 Hugo Award for Best Novel. It is a worthy contender, one out of the box and breaking many a musty mold.
It is testament to Ryka Aoki's craft that the disparate elements of this fantastic story add up to be more than their constituent parts.
On the face of it, runaway transgender violin prodigies, space aliens refugees escaping an Empire consuming plague of despair to run a heritage donut shop, a violin prodigy turned elite teacher who has sold her soul in a pact with a devious demon, a luthier who cannot inherit the family business on account of being the wrong sex and a smattering of queer/trans romance leavened with Asian food fetishes (yum) just should not work.
But it does and triumphantly so.
The mixture of science fiction elements (stargates, blasters, memory wipes, an AI daughter and food replicators) with fantasy elements (demons, cursed violin bows and the sacrifice of souls for fleeting temporal fame) saturates itself with humanity, hope and more than a bit of love and affection.
Katrina Nguyen's journey is primarily an uplifting one. There are terrors along the way, but they can be overcome, and the very fact can drag others along with them. Maybe it is not so strange to posit that music can asuage the despair of insignificance?
A finalist for the 2022 Hugo Award for Best Novel. It is a worthy contender, one out of the box and breaking many a musty mold.