I suspect I will be in a minority of readers who come to A Scatter of Light as their first Malinda Lo novel. It is a companion to the author’s New York Times bestselling Last Night at the Telegraph Club. Unlike that one, this novel is not historical but rather modern (it’s set in 2008, 2013, and even an epilogue set in the future), and those years felt more there to show passing, rather than the dates necessarily being vital for the story. From what I can glean from reviews of her other novels though, it has a similar tenderness and softness in its telling of first love.
I’m always going to be a fan of love stories involving cute androgynous queers, and this one features the sexy Steph, a gardener and handy person who acts as our heroine Aria’s queer awakening.
Trying to avoid any spoilers so I’ll keep it vague but the novel doesn’t have the cliché or predictable easy ending that you might expect if you were thinking of it as a romance novel. Instead it’s a more mature coming-of-age story, showing the characters’ personal growth and different futures for themselves.
'Beautifully rendered and instantly captivating. Malinda Lo writes queer desire like no other.' DIVA MAGAZINE
'Lo writes tenderly about the first buds of teenage desire amid a downtown hipster at scene.' DAILY MAIL
'Poignant, vivid and so beautifully written. I adored it.' LAURA KAY
A Scatter of Light is a companion novel to the National Book Awards winner and New York Times bestseller Last Night at the Telegraph Club, and is about how the threads of family, inspiration, art, and identity are woven across generations.
Aria Tang West thought she'd be spending one last summer on Martha's Vineyard with her friends before starting MIT in the fall, where she intends to study astronomy, like her late grandfather. But after topless photos of her are posted online, she's abruptly uninvited from her friends' summer homes.
Aria's parents, a writer and opera singer with plans of their own, send Aria to stay with her artist grandmother, Joan West, in Northern California. Although Aria has never been attracted to girls before, she finds herself drawn to Joan's gardener, Steph Nichols, an aspiring musician a few years older than Aria. The only problem? Steph isn't single; she lives with her girlfriend, Lisa. But the chemistry between Aria and Steph seems undeniable, and this will be a summer that will turn her world upside down.
