Review: Light Years From Home by Mike Chen

Author: Mike Chen
Edition: eARC/audiobook
Publisher: MIRA (January 25, 2022)
Genre: Adult, Science Fiction

Synopsis

My review of Light Years From Home

Light Years From Home is a nuanced and delicate sci-fi family drama about truth, perception and moving on from trauma.

I received a free ARC from the author in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.

Perception, Truth and Reality

To be honest, I am not sure my review can do this book justice. But I’m going to attempt to explain why this book feels special and why it might be just what you need to read.

I wanted to devour Light Years From Home while simultaneously wishing I could take months to read it. It hits so close to home in this world where our perception of reality and each other have irreversibly changed and we need to work out how to live with that.

This book made me cry multiple times and once I finished it, I just let myself lie on the floor and continued to cry for a while. Don’t get me wrong, Light Years From Home is not a sad book. It is funny and action-filled and mind-boggling in the best of ways. But it is also so real. It’s the kind of book that, as you read it, reads you back and says “I see you, I witness your pain and your reality”. And that is an overwhelming but also incredibly cathartic experience.

Light Years From Home is about aliens and space wars, but it is also about family trauma and how different people try and fail to move on. It’s about attempting to fix things. It is a book about belief in its many forms. It’s about the challenge of a life-altering event creating rifts in our reality and suddenly not recognising the people we thought we knew. Subsequently, this book very much grapples with experiences that I share, having lived through these past unprecedented years.

It’s not a pandemic book in the traditional sense, there is no pandemic central to the plot. But it might be the more important kind of pandemic book, reflecting on our changed relationship to reality, truth and each other. Between the aliens and sci-fi excitement, Light Years From Home has found words for what it feels like to live in our world during traumatic times. And it manages to explore all of that while being a funny and engaging family drama. I think this balance works because Mike Chen is a master of his craft.

A Masterpiece of Character and Conflict

Mike Chen is incredible at building characters and conflicts. One aspect of his craft that never fails to amaze me is the sense of internal consistency of both plot and characters. The world he creates feels real, the characters feel like real people. Ultimately, this means that I get very, very attached to them. I learn their quirks and habits, inhabit their bodies and minds and see the world the way they do. One of the main characters, Evie, has a habit of taking selfies to remember important moments. This shows up throughout the book and eventually leaked into my own life. Because after finishing the book, like Evie, I took a selfie because it felt important to remember the way I felt.

Speaking of Evie, she’s one of my favourite characters I’ve encountered in a while. She’s driven (mostly by grief she refuses to accept), intelligent and has the annoying stubbornness that only younger siblings have. Her reaction to losing Jakob and her dad is to try and fix it, by proving they were taken by aliens.

Kass, on the other hand, has both feet firmly on the ground. Her version of fixing it looks like repression and her grief has turned into anger. She’s the one grappling with the earthly consequences of Jakob’s disappearance. Her life revolves around taking care of her mother with dementia and playing an RPG with her ex-husband. Where Evie always looks up towards possibilities, Kass is faced with the hard, limiting ground of her reality. The two women are polar opposites, almost living in separate realities that are forced into a collision when Jakob returns.

Throughout the book, Jakob almost feels like a distant outsider. We can tell he loves his family, but he has fundamentally changed and his frame of reference is different. Yes, his family matters, but preventing an intergalactic war matters more. Light Years From Home is not a book about Jakob. It’s about the consequences of his actions, the ripples he creates. Jakob is the inciting incident.

Ultimately, Light Years From Home is probably the most accurate portrayal of siblings and dysfunctional family dynamics I have ever read. This is a testament to Mike Chen’s deep understanding of his characters and the way they relate to each other. The Shao family feels strikingly and painfully real.

Overall…

I don’t think reading is meant to build empathy and it’s not something that we can ask from books. But Light Years From Home does it anyway. Quietly, it presents us with multiple distinct versions of the same reality. Parts of them overlap, parts of them clash. We come to understand that the truth is a matter of circumstance, it’s not the same thing to everyone. And reality? It’s hidden in the space between us.

This book is for you if…

…you like character-focused sci-fi
…you are looking for a book with realistic sibling and family dynamics

A post you might also enjoy: My Review of We Could Be Heroes by Mike Chen