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.
"Full of yearning, ponderances about art and what it means to be an artist, and self-revelation, A Scatter of Light has a simmering intensity that makes it hard to put down."-NPR
An Instant New York Times Bestseller
Last Night at the Telegraph Club author Malinda Lo returns to the Bay Area with another masterful queer coming-of-age story, this time set against the backdrop of the first major Supreme Court decisions legalizing gay marriage.
Aria Tang West was looking forward to a summer on Martha's Vineyard with her best friends-one last round of sand and sun before college. But after a graduation party goes wrong, Aria's parents exile her to California to stay with her grandmother, artist Joan West. Aria expects boredom, but what she finds is Steph Nichols, her grandmother's gardener. Soon, Aria is second-guessing who she is and what she wants to be, and a summer that once seemed lost becomes unforgettable-for Aria, her family, and the working-class queer community Steph introduces her to. It's the kind of summer that changes a life forever.
And almost sixty years after the end of Last Night at the Telegraph Club, A Scatter of Light also offers a glimpse into Lily and Kath's lives since 1955.
