A Scatter of Light by Malinda Lo
Aria Tang West is ready to spend one final summer with her friends in Martha’s Vineyard before starting at MIT in the autumn. But when topless photos of her at a graduation party are posted online, her parents send her off to spend the summer with her grandmother, artist Joan West, in San Francisco.
Aria expects to be lonely and bored, but instead she meets Steph Nicholls, her grandmother’s gardener, and suddenly her summer is full of possibility. Instead of spending the summer going to parties with her high school friends, she’s going to Pride marches, helping her grandmother sort through her grandfather’s old papers, and questioning her own identity.
A Scatter of Light is filled with an aching longing that builds over the course of the novel. Aria doesn’t start out struggling to define herself; she knows she wants to follow in her grandfather’s footsteps and study astronomy at MIT, and she’s always assumed she’s straight. But as she spends more time with Steph, the harder it is for Aria to deny how attracted she is to the other girl. There are no happily-ever-afters here – Steph has a long-term girlfriend and Aria is about to start university on the other side of the country – but the beauty of the novel is in the discovery and the heartbreak.
Malinda Lo writes complex characters and situations with an almost magical clarity and simplicity. The novel is set in 2013, during the legalisation of same-sex marriage in the United States; it would be easy to write this book with an air of celebration and lighthearted joy. But the feeling Lo captures is the feeling I remember: a much more realistic one. It is a feeling of uncertainty, upheaval and change. This is truly a gorgeous summer read. For ages 15+.
