A Long Island Reads 2020 Selection * A Real Simple Best Book of 2019 From the bestselling author of The Book of Speculation, a “tender and ambitious” (Vulture) novel about time, loss, and the wonders of the universe. Eleven-year-old Nedda Papas is obsessed with becoming an astronaut. In 1986 in Easter, a small Florida Space Coast town, her dreams seem almost within reach–if she can just grow up … reach–if she can just grow up fast enough. Theo, the scientist father she idolizes, is consumed by his own obsessions. Laid off from his job at NASA and still reeling from the loss of Nedda’s newborn brother several years before, Theo turns to the dangerous dream of extending his daughter’s childhood just a little longer. The result is an invention that alters the fabric of time. Decades later, Nedda has achieved her long-held dream and is traveling aboard the space ship Chawla, part of a small group hoping to colonize a distant planet. But as she floats in zero gravity, far from earth, she and her crewmates face a serious crisis. Nedda may hold the key to the solution, if she can come to terms with her past and the future that awaits her. For fans of The Age of Miracles and The Immortalists, Erika Swyler’s Light from Other Stars is a masterful and ambitious novel about fathers and daughters, women and the forces that hold them back, and the true meaning of progress.
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Utterly brilliant. 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.
This is my second book by Ms. Swyler and it is really quite different. I believe that “The Book of Speculation” was more magical realism and this one is science fiction. I think it might be important for readers to know that. I do not read science fiction and some parts of this novel were just plain frustrating for me. The believability factor was a problem for me at first but then I thought I would just sort of turn myself over to the book and just see where it would carry me.
We are thrown into the future right at the beginning of the book as Nedda Papas is waking up on the spaceship Crawla, to the sound of birdsong from her now long ago childhood. She and her crewmates are on a several years journey to another planet where they will build a base and determine whether this may be a planet suitable for human life since earth is slowly dying.
The science part of this section and a lot of the book is what dragged for me and some of the descriptions were quite long. It was in the frustrating scientific details that this book lost me a little, I just wanted to get on with the story! I however did learn, and you should know it now because it will appear many times in the book that : “ Entropy is the measure of randomness or disorder in a system”. (wikepedia) or as Nedda had learned from her father, “ Is it about entropy? . . . . .He told me that’s what the machine was for. To control it. To speed it up, or to stop it. It’s heat loss, energy loss, but it’s time too”
The setting for the dual timeline is 1986 in a small town around NASA’s rocket and shuttle launching station. Nedda Papes was lying on the top of her dad’s car waiting to catch a glimpse of Halley’s Comet. We get to know Nedda very well, her love of all things space related, her obsession to someday be an astronaut. The absolute horror as she watched on the TV at school, The Challenger shuttle blow up with all of the astronaut’s lives lost.
She is 11 years old and is brilliant in science but otherwise a typical pre-adolescent. She has a good friend, Denny, whose orange grove they like to hide in, they also like to stop in Pete’s backyard, he collects old NASA equipment and just anything basically from all of the previous launches, he used to work there and if something interesting was being thrown away Pete would probably bring it home.
There are lot of characters in this novel and I won’t go through all of them, they are flawed, some likable, some not, but I found them believable. You have also read a blurb about where some of the story is going, but I think you will all be surprised. I’m not going to talk about the story in fear of spoiling your enjoyment of the book.
This novel I believe is about exploration and loss, fathers and daughters, mothers and how they are sometimes seen through their daughter’s eyes. (Betheen told her daughter “Don’t think for one second he’s the only reason you’re smart”.)
At times I wasn’t sure where the many threads of this story were leading but it was a fun and entertaining ride.
I received an ARC of this novel from the author and publisher through Edelweiss.
It’s strength is in its characters and how it portrays their relationships. They are the backbone of this book, and their journeys and how they change over the events of the story were absolutely captivating. Even if you don’t like SciFi, you might gravitate towards this book just for the way Swyler writes her characters. They are flawed but full of love for one another.
If you liked Good Morning, Midnight, I would highly recommend “The Light From Other Stars” and vice versa.–especially if you enjoyed the style of prose in either one.
The idea of time travel is intriguing but the science in this book is just confusing and contrived. Some of the characters were endearing but The Martian it is not.
Such a beautifully written story of love and sacrifice. I especially loved the dual timeline between the “present” and 1985 – more specifically the day the Challenger blew up. As a child of the 80s, that was a moment I’ll never forget. It was the perfect backdrop for a story about childhood innocence and how children see their parents.
Great read…kleptocracy you guessing til the end
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.
A poignant, beautiful tale that perfectly captures humanity’s timeless struggle to reconcile love and loss. As Nedda Papas faces mystery and danger both in the orange groves of her childhood and the vastness of space as an adult, Light from Other Stars keenly but tenderly illuminates the almost magical limits of science, the sacrifices that passion requires, and what it truly means to be a family.
As smart and ambitious as its heroine, Light from Other Stars is an absorbing, propulsive story of exploration and loss.
At once expansive and strikingly intimate, Light from Other Stars is a story you won’t be able to put down . . . This book is no less than a declaration that life is worth living, which makes it a vital book for our times.
Wonderfully imaginative . . . a poignant novel about the flawed but limitless love between parents and children. Swyler presses a deft finger on the fissures between art and science, love and loss, regret and hope, imprinting the reader’s heart with an exquisite ache—the kind that lingers long after the story ends.
I was so excited when I won this book in a giveaway as I loved The Book of Speculation. While I’ve been thoroughly disappointed by many second novels in the past that was not my concern here. I didn’t think an author who wrote so beautifully and poetically could possibly have done so by a fluke or luck alone. My only concern was that the first would be so hard to follow up. But she did! This novel is just as poetic (never have math and science sounded so elegant) and the characters just as likable . I won’t give a plot rundown as I’m sure there are plenty of reviewers who are capable of doing that much more succinctly than I. I will say while this is technically a sci-fi novel—set both in past (1986) and future and on earth and in space — it’s so much more. It’s a story about a little girl with big dreams, a dad who has good intentions but causes something terrible, the complicated relationship between parent and child, how grief changes us all in different ways and the ways in which loved ones stay with us long after they’ve left us. It brought tears to my eyes and made me laugh. This is one of those books that you can read over and over without it losing it’s magic. Just read it, it’s worth it!!