Light from Other Stars

I closed this book with a sense of awe, knowing it's one of those rare novels that will mark a before and after for me. The characters in this book are heart breakingly real - and Swyler has an uncanny ability to express the truth about relationships and all of the ways love simultaneously heals and hurts us. Awesome science fiction elements including space travel and time anomalies, but it was the humanity of the book, triumphant and profound, that took my breath away.

Swyler expertly tells the story of small town life and exploring the outer expanse of our universe and does both with amazing beauty. The Pappas women help shed a light on the educational discrimination that has silently (And often not so silently) discouraged women from pursuing careers in STEM fields and force us to ask ourselves why it continues to happen and shows us the possibilities that can come from letting go of our preconceived notions of what a person should be. Recommended for all lovers of great stories.

Do not wait to read this one. This is a book that kept me fully engaged from start to finish. I finished wanting more!

Florida 1986 and the start of the Space Shuttle program. Meet Nedda. 11 years old and far smarter than her years. Nedda has grown up in the shadow of the space program, in a small town called Easter, a short way from Cape Canaveral. Her father used to work for NASA, but now teaches at the small college nearby. Her mother is a baker creating fascinating concoctions. Nedda’s best friend is Denny, the son of a 3rd generation orange grower. Prater oranges are special oranges, everyone says so. They have a variety of grapefruit that is really special. Denny doesn’t much care about the oranges, but he cares about Nedda and machines.

Nedda’s parents have a secret that they’ve kept from her. A secret that has formed their future selves into what they are now. Nedda dreams of becoming an astronaut like her heroes. Nedda’s father Theo is building something in his lab at the college. Something called the Crucible that is going to change time. Something that is going to forever change Easter and the people who reside there.

While this book starts with Nedda aboard a ship heading toward an unknown planet, we spend time alternating between 1986 and Nedda’s current day on the spaceship. Swyler masterfully takes us back and forth to build the story about Nedda’s past and future. How a small girl with a huge mind helped to alter history once and again. It is also about love. Love of things and people.

I cannot say enough about this book. I stayed up way past my bedtime because Swyler created a world that was fascinating and frightening all at once. It is one of the best books I’ve read in a long time.

Review also posted at bookwormishme.com

I loved the premise of Light From Other Stars when I read it. The story lost me, unfortunately. It's not a bad story or badly written. I got lost somewhere in the scientific stuff, and I just couldn't maintain interest enough. I skimmed through probably half of the story. If scientific stuff is your thing, you'll like it. Thanks to NetGalley for an arc in exchange for an honest review.

Loved it! Very different in tone from her first book, but I was still hooked from the first page to the last.

This book has been getting a lot of hype so I was really looking forward to reading it and seeing if it lived up to its promise. It’s well written in a lyrical, almost poetic way. That’s the good part. The not-so-good part for me was all the scientific details and the sci-fi aspects. Half the time I couldn’t figure out what they were talking about and after awhile I didn’t really care

Author Erika Swyler’s book description provides the right amount of insight into her novel LIGHT FROM OTHER STARS that for me to speak to anything further story-wise, I would be writing spoilers or providing a mere synopsis of LIGHT FROM OTHER STARS which would not be a book review.

In full disclosure, this is the first science fiction book I have read, and I have no good explanation to offer as to why I have never read science fiction. However, after opening LIGHT FROM OTHER STARS and devouring Swyler's novel, I thought to myself, “How silly am I? After all the science fiction movies I have gone to see, have wanted to see." Why should I have been surprised to find myself savoring Swyler’s novel LIGHT FROM OTHER STARS? A 5 STAR novel.

While Swyler wrote her novel using two parallel timelines, the first beginning with Nedda as an astronaut peering out the window of her spacecraft at a universe that made her feel infinitely small, and her second timeline as an eleven-year-old girl who idolized her ex-NASA physicist mad scientist father. Nedda's father, the basement physicist who was responsible for their home town lost from existence for a significant period. On the other hand, Nedda found her mother fascinating but frightening, due to her odd behavior. Swyler championed the movement between her two parallel storylines, and as she moved between the storylines, she did so skillfully, without pause. As Swyler moved between the two timelines, I moved with her, never feeling left behind or perplexed as I traversed back and forth between the parallel timeline shifts.

“What’s my Little Twitch been up to?” “The name settled on her like a hug. She was his Little Twitch because she gnawed through pencils, bounced her feet when nervous, chewed her lip. Because it felt good. Because moving made thoughts work better.” – LIGHT FROM OTHER STARS

LIGHT FROM OTHER STARS is a brilliant, poignant, innovative novel. Swyler very astutely joined space events and crises that were both real and fictitious. She also depicted multiple relationships and joined the human emotions of love, loss, chaos, hope, regret, fear, et cetera as done by the best authors. She integrated interactions and emotions in multiple social connections between father and daughter, mother and daughter, husband and wife, friends, neighbors, astronauts, and peers. Swyler’s character development was sensational. I applaud Swyler in her ability to present unique character emotions as artistically inerrant; feelings that passed from the character to the reader.

As we know the Kennedy Space Center is in Cape Canaveral, Florida, Swyler’s protagonist lives in Easter, Florida which does not, in reality, exist, but LIGHT FROM OTHER STARS is a fictitious novel although, there are non-fiction overtures. I sensed Swyler deliberately created Easter as a town to introduce some of the non-fiction astronautical facts concerning calendars & timing, which were influenced by religion and the movement of the moon and space. Swyler would have to confirm this, so don’t take it to the bank. I lived in Titusville, Florida during my elementary school years, and still remember the windows rattling each time there was a launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. I used to fear the windows would shatter and always went outside for every launch; It is my memories from these times that gave me a deeper connection to LIGHT FROM OTHER STARS.

“She thought she had fear burned out of her in 1986, that particular emotion replaced by grit. “I didn’t think I would be, but I’m scared,” she said. “So was the first person who ate a lobster. But he was also hungry,” – LIGHT FROM OTHER STARS

The many non-fiction events woven into LIGHT FROM OTHER STARS, such as the technology, the Challenger exploding and killing all seven astronauts onboard in 1986, climate change, et cetera. Because I have not, until now, read science fiction. It was the non-fiction infused with the fictitious in LIGHT FROM OTHER STARS that kept me rapidly turning the pages. I also remained anxious about what would happen next. It was the anxiousness, and the uncertainty of what was coming that felt to me like mystery and suspense woven in with the science fiction and coming of age in LIGHT FROM OTHER STARS.

Regardless of your preferred genre, I strongly encourage readers from all genres to read Swyler’s LIGHT FROM OTHER STARS. As I indicated at the beginning of my review, science fiction had never been a preferred reading genre of mine, but surprise, as much as I enjoyed this novel, I will be adding science fiction to my reading genres. I also hope that Swyler is inspired to write a sequel to LIGHT FROM OTHER STARS. Swyler is one heck of a writer, and I would be remiss if I failed to mention the extent of research Swyler had to do to write such an irreproachable novel.

I learned a valuable life lesson from reading LIGHT FROM OTHER STARS. Sometimes, when we step outside of our comfort zones, we discover that which we thought we were not interested in has no basis. For instance, someone who has never eaten Brussel Sprouts may assert that they do not like them, and they are adamant that they do not want anything to do with them until by accident, or purpose they eat a Brussel Sprout, and suddenly Brussel Sprouts become their vegetable of choice. So it is for me with reading science fiction. LIGHT FROM OTHER STARS is a breathtakingly beautifully written novel. Do yourself a favor and buy this book today. Take the remarkable journeys within this extraordinary novel, from Easter, FL to space and back.

Thank you to Bloomsbury Publishing, Erika Swyler and NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review LIGHT FROM OTHER STARS.

I understand the desire to label things, but, in this instance, I think calling LIGHT FROM OTHER STARS science fiction, or speculative fiction, does it a disservice. It is a deeply affecting study of the shape of relationships, the ways in which our unspoken desires and motivations can be misinterpreted, can cause rifts and absences --- in this case, quite literal rifts in time and space.

I don't want to over-explain or plot-describe, because part of the joy of this (for me) was the mosaic like laying out of details, glorious individual tiles of character and behavior that coalesce as the novel progresses.

Nedda, the heroine, is both precocious and outsider child, and brilliant and --- again --- other-ish adult, but the shape of her life in each circumstance is quite different, and for reasons grounded in her character arc.

Now, I don't read much science fiction or speculative fiction or magic realism, it's never been my thing, and this novel, after I'd read it, and then read reviews and write-ups, I was surprised --- taken aback --- that it was called science fiction. Erika Swyler's writing has this vibration of truth, it's gut-talk, without pretense, I consider her a gifted literary fiction-ist, and it says so much about this book that I didn't register its "science fiction" aspects as things outside the realm of our current reality --- so good, so natural, so in the moment are Erika Swyler's sentences, emotings, characters, that genre doesn't apply.

It's good writing, and a good story, and a deeply moving study of humanity, human feelings, and the ways in which love, and the urge to protect and preserve others, can do just the opposite. Quite brilliant. Quite touching. Quite wonderful.

Read it.

It is 1986 and eleven-year-old Nedda Papas is obsessed with becoming an astronaut. Her father, Theo, is a scientist who has recently been laid off from his job at NASA. Theo is being consumed by an idea of his own making as a result of never getting over the loss of his newborn son—he has invented something that will alter time.

This is a story of women, of fathers and daughters, and of sacrifice.

I've been a fan of Swyler's writing since reviewing The Mermaid Girl, which is the prequel to The Book of Speculation. While I enjoyed the exploration of the father-daughter relationship, this story missed the mark. I feel party responsible for the mediocrity I felt while reading this book because I didn't realize it was science fiction. That's not a criticism of the genre, it is just simply not for me and had I realized this, I would not have requested the book.

The story is framed in two time periods—at the time of the Challenger explosion and then in the future. It was the futuristic timeline/time in space that was disengaging and I was happy to be immersed in the earlier timeline.

What I did enjoy was the writing, there is no doubt that Swyler is a talented author, but I felt bogged down by the terminology and high level of detail and therefore was emotionally disconnected.

Having recently finished Mike Chen’s Here and Now and Then, I undertook another sci-fi novel—and was blown away by Light from Other Stars. Wow!!!—exquisite prose in an ambitious novel told in two timelines, the present (with the protagonist, Nedda Pappas, on a space voyage with three other crew members) and the past which looks at the effects of a machine Nedda’s father built intended to fight entropy—he wants to give his daughter all the time she needs to mature. Instead, his machine, the Crucible, wreaks havoc on the Florida town of Easter, its orange groves, kudzu, and its inhabitants, particularly Nedda’s best friend Denny and her father.

Light from Other Stars starts with Nedda at age eleven, watching the Challenger disaster, and mourning her idolized astronauts. She is a prodigy who feels “it was stupid to send grown men into space when a girl would be a better fit.” Later, she is an astronaut whizzing through space with three other crew members with an ailing life support system.

This is a book that tears at your heart and soul. I sobbed through a goodly portion of it. It’s hard to imagine a sci-fi book so focused on pure, deep emotion while centered on the Earth and the wonders of space. Light from Other Stars hits big issues: loneliness, the bond between parent and child; grief; death and what happens to us after death. Theo, Nedda’s father is an archetypal absent-minded professor character, but her mother, Betheen, is unique. She goes from being a mother unable to bond with her daughter to one who handles the biggest crisis in her daughter’s life with aplomb, giving incredibly poignant advice that both comforts Nedda and admits to its own limitations.

Plain and simple, I loved this book.