Ziesings
4/19/2022
Ryka Aoki has cooked up a very ambitious meal of a novel, bringing together a family of galactic empire fleeing alien refugees, a world class violinist / soul-stealing servant of hell, and our unlikely protagonist, an abused teenage transsexual runaway that is way WAY down on her luck. How does she do it? With good food and good music of course! Aoki can put the flavor on your taste buds and the music in your ear with dazzling descriptions of food and song throughout that serve as mechanisms to conjoin otherwise severely disjointed characters and plot. She does; however, struggle with some of the SF aspects of her story that come off as juvenile in a "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure" kind of way. The silly and improbable space technology clashes a bit with some of the serious aspects of the story like rape, prostitution, and LGBT and racial bigotry. This book took me out of my comfort zone many times with disturbing depictions of what it's like to be on the receiving end of the worst of mankind's abusive and prejudicial nature, and through that discomfort, helped me with some personal growth that I hadn't fully recognized that I needed. No matter how abrasive some of the content can be, the reader is always brought back to the soul-saving goodness of family, food, and fiddles (violins rather!). Overall, Aoki is able to pull off her ambitious concoction that may go down as an excellent time-capsule of 2021 socio-political angst, if not quite what I would consider to be a Hugo Award nominee literary level of merit. I can understand why many people would disagree with me on that though. Pretty good, 2.5/5.