“Behind every brilliant woman is her doubly brilliant mother.”

** Trigger warning for child abuse. **

She knew them by their light, the gentle differences—Amit’s warm, yellowish brown, Evgeni who glowed like a pearl, Louisa who was brighter than all of them. Nedda would know them anywhere; if she lost their shapes, she’d recognize their light.

They would likely die. It was why they were childless, unwed. Freedom of sacrifice. It was a shame that only three people would ever again be in the same room as Evgeni when he sang. Only three people would know that Singh ate with his pinkie out. That Marcanta pulled hairs from her eyebrows when frustrated. Children would know their names, and drive on roads named Sokolov or Papas. Children would know their ship, Chawla, and who she’d hauled. A little girl somewhere would rattle off everything she’d read about them, and with it everything she knew about space and time, about light.

###


“I got a boat too. It’s not real big, just enough to take a few people out, that’s all.”

“What’d you name it?”

“Flux Capacitor.”

“Doc Brown’s a better name.”

“Yeah, but boats are women.”

“Everything’s a woman. Cars, boats, houses. Anywhere that’s safe or takes you somewhere better is a woman,” she said.

“So, Chawla is a woman?”

“Obviously.” She opened her eye to find him staring.

###

Her father’s machine was as much hope and wish as it was metal and glass.

###

In the present day – her present, our future – Nedda Papas has achieved everything she’s dreamed of. As one quarter of the crew of Chawla, Nedda is humanity’s last best chance. Climate change has wrought havoc on earth: rising sea levels have disappeared entire islands and shrunk continents, hunger fueled by drought is the new normal, and wildfires plague what little land is left. The planet is beyond saving; now flight is the only long-term option.

Sent to colonize another planet in a galaxy far, far away, Nedda will never again set foot on earth. And she’s okay with that – it’s for the greater good, after all, and doesn’t she owe her species at least that much, anyway? But when cost-cutting and politicking threatens Chawla’s success, Nedda must revisit her past in order to salvage our future.
It was 1986 when Nedda’s world imploded: first, with the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster; and again with Theo Pappas’s magnum opus, the Crucible.

Light from Other Stars unfolds in two parallel narratives: aboard the Chawla, and in January/February 1986, when Nedda is eleven years old.

Middle-schooler Nedda lives Easter, Florida, in the shadow of Kennedy Space Center. She and her professor father Theo – newly laid off from NASA after the latest round of budget cuts – are inseparable, whether devising and executing experiments or trying to spot Halley’s Comet shoot across the night sky. Her relationship with mother Betheen is a little frostier, but not necessarily for lack of mutual interests: Beth is a chemist. But her (women’s) work is undervalued, because of course it is. It also doesn’t help that Betheen has been drowning in grief for most of young Nedda’s life. But spoilers!

Theo has suffered from psoriatic arthritis since childhood, and the joint pain and inflammation makes his work difficult (as does the markedly inferior resources at Haverstone College). Ostensibly, this is the impetus behind his crowning achievement, the Crucible, a machine that can slow down, stop, or even reverse time (and thus heal all manner of physical injuries) by manipulating entropy. (Swyler includes a fair amount of background on the science, only a fraction of which I can claim to understand, and I have no idea how sound it is. But I didn’t find these bits boring or excessive, fwiw.)
Theo’s machine is a success, in a manner of speaking, but things go sideways, because of course they do. When Crucible threatens to devour all of Easter (including Nedda’s best friend Denny), it’s up to Nedda and Betheen to save the day.

Judy Resnik, Sally Ride, Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee, Ed White – Nedda’s heroes have always been astronauts. WWJD – What would Judy do?

As much as I loved Swyler’s previous novel, THE BOOK OF SPECULATION, I think she managed to outdo herself with LIGHT FROM OTHER STARS. It is beautiful and magical and excruciating in the best way. I am writing this review weeks after turning the last page, tears coursing down my face anew. (Okay, that makes my ugly crying sound a lot prettier than it is. A spectacle, I am making one.)

A big part of this are the passages on death and dying and the afterlife. I’m an atheist, and don’t generally envy people their religious beliefs … that is, unless it’s the comfort that the grieving can find in stories about heaven (or reincarnation, or what have you). Some days I’d give anything to believe that I’ll be reunited with my deceased love ones, eventually. But I can’t make myself believe in something I don’t, even when it’s convenient, and so I go scavenging for secular comfort wherever I can find it, like a sad, lonely little heathen magpie.

I find it in all sorts of places (but mostly books, to no one’s surprise): Aaron Freeman’s essay, “You want a physicist to speak at your funeral.” The passages in THE SUBTLE KNIFE where Lyra and Will lead the ghosts out of the world of the dead. The entire science-based religion created by Lauren Olamina in Octavia Butler’s PARABLES duology. Add to that Theo Pappas’s ideas about thoughts, memories, and electrical impulses; heat and light; gas and carbon and star parts. (Carl Sagan’s quote about starstuff! I knew I was forgetting something!) There’s some truly breathtaking stuff in here. This is a wonderfully godless book; a wonderful book for the godless. I’ll hold it close to my heart and cherish it, always.

(I want desperately to include some excerpts here, but spoilers!)

LIGHT FROM OTHER STARS is also fiercely feminist, even if the ferocity sometimes comes in a whisper instead of a shout. It’s a story about fathers and daughters and fathers and sons … but also, especially, about mothers and daughters and mothers and sons. Nedda’s relationship with Theo is as magnificent as it is tenuous, but her bond with Betheen is all the more wonderful for its complexity, for the way it grows and strengthens and changes – and holds fast even across the vast chasm of space. Nedda’s evolving perception of her mother as she discovers what Betheen is capable of is a revelation. I wonder if they ever perfected that champagne cake together?

Last but not least, it’s a joy to watch as these two narratives come together, often in unexpected ways (Amadeus, I’m looking at you).

Swyler’s writing is exquisite and will pummel you right in the feels. I really hope Netflix picks this one up for a screenplay or miniseries. I need to see what time made liquid looks like, stat.

This amazing story almost lost me at the beginning where we find Nedda as a grown woman on a spaceship travelling with three others on a long journey to colonize a new planet. I haven’t been drawn to much science fiction since I read all the classics voraciously as a teen and young adult. However, when the setting quickly changed to a Florida town where Nedda lived as a child, my interest bloomed.

At eleven years old in 1986, with a scientist father who is inventing a time-manipulation machine and a chemist-turned-baker mother, Nedda dreams of becoming an astronaut and is devastated by the explosion of the Challenger launch her class watches on television nearby.

The ensuing pair of story lines, what happens when shockwaves from the explosion affect the machine her father has christened the Crucible (and which affects the entire town,) and far into the future, how Nedda and her fellow astronauts cope with a life-threatening development on board their ship, kept me reading to find out what was going to happen then and now.

As in other Sci-fi books I’ve read, the scientific details were less interesting to me than the relationships between characters. Nedda’s father and mother and her best friend are wonderfully developed characters. Details of what happened back in 1986 in Easter, Florida, emerge from both story lines as Nedda speaks by video transmission to a couple of those who are still living decades in the future. Then the action switches back to the chaos of the events in the past that shaped her life.

Keenly plotted and emotionally gripping, this tale grabbed me and didn’t let go until I reached the awe-inspiring end. Thanks to the publisher, Bloomsbury, and Net Galley, for providing me with the ARC of this great book.

I really enjoyed Swyler's "The Book of Speculation" so I was very much looking forward to reading this one. I must say it was completely different and, I believe, better than "Speculation". This is a Sci-Fi novel. It is a heady mix of physics, chemistry, astronomy and human emotion. The writing was beautiful and the characters well drawn out. I particularly liked Betheen, the mom. Betheen was a brilliant chemist who decided to start a family and apply her vast chemistry knowledge to baking. I loved this juxtaposition. This takes placed in 1986 so Betheen's choice is believable. The story, however, centers around the daughter, Nedda, a brilliant 11 year old with a yearning to be an astronaut. She idolizes astronaut Judy Resnick who is killed in the Challenger explosion while Nedda watches from her classroom. Following the Challenger explosion, Nedda's father's invention (much physics around this involving time) goes horribly wrong. Nedda and her mother must work together using science and her father's notebooks. The story also fast forwards to Nedda as an adult on a space journey to help save a dying planet. The novel comes full circle in the most brilliant way.

and she is devastated when she watched the Challenger Catastrophe at her school. I could relate to this part of the book as I also watched the Challenger break apart 73 seconds into its flight live in my science class. But that is not where the book begins, the book begins when an adult Nedda is in space aboard the Chawla. She has been in space for two years and has several more to go before they land. The crew is in search of a new place to live as Earth is slowly dying. While in space she is looking back at her childhood, her parents, her father's experiment, her friend, Denny, the Challenger explosion, her school and community.
Eleven-year-old Nedda Papas wants to be an astronaut. Her father once worked for NASA (was laid off)
This book was a bit of a struggle for me and there were times that I thought of putting the book down and not finishing. But I pushed through. I am on the fence with Science fiction- I either love of or just can't connect with it. As I stated I struggled with this one. The science parts really slowed this book down for me and I found that as always, it was the human relationships which worked. I did appreciate how the Author tried to give the reader various perspectives through the people in the town about Nedda's father’s experiment and his reason for the experiment. I typically do not have an issue with suspending belief but for some reason this just didn't work for me here. Consider me an outlier. The dual time lines didn't bother me however, as I mentioned I just struggled through this entire book. I believe this is more of a case of it is me and not the book. Read other reviews and read the book synopsis. I believe most science fiction fans will really enjoy this book.

Thank you to Bloomsbury Publishing and NetGalley who provided me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. All the thoughts and opinions are my own.

A young girl's dreams of becoming an astronaut are influenced by her family and outside events, including the explosion of the Challenger in 1986. Told in dual time, present and past, she has achieved her goal but must now figure out how her life will affect others. Along the way, she has had to examine her relationships with her parents and how their actions have influenced her choices. A great fiction with science fiction overtones.

'She’d adapted to homesickness before and viewing the Earth from above didn’t move her. Her home wasn’t a distance; it was time and a sparrow.'

When I was in elementary school, living on the Space Coast in Melbourne, we students were marched out single file vibrating with excitement to watch the space shuttle launch of the Challenger. In fact, my father worked as an Engineer with EG&G and other family members worked out on the cape too, so it was always a big deal for us. I was lucky enough to see the first space shuttle launch in 1981, close up and amazing. On January 28th, 1986 despite being a beautiful day with a clear blue sky, there wasn’t a reason for me to think anything could go wrong. We children witnessed in horror as the Challenger exploded. Naturally younger children didn’t fully grasp what occurred, but we older students listened via the intercom system in the cafeteria about the tragedy we had just watch unfold live, above our heads. In 1986, Nedda Papas yearns to be an astronaut, and is crushed that Judy Resnik, much admired by young Nedda as Resnik was a biomedical engineer, electrical engineer, software engineer, pilot and astronaut, dies aboard the Challenger. “We didn’t really see it. Maybe just like an echo of it.” Nedda’s scientific mind is on overdrive, following the tragedy, thinking about light years. Coping with the loss she spends time with her father Theo, obsessed with his work on The Crucible in the town of Easter after his layoff from NASA. The Crucible, we learn, is a machine that is meant to ‘speed and slow down entropy’, that can ‘arrange energy’, play with time. Her mother Betheen may spend her time baking unique recipes, but she gave up her life as a chemist to be a mother. “Theo had left her the kitchen, Betheen had let him have the basement.” She knows what the real purpose of the machine is… to stop loss. When a horrible accident occurs after Nedda and her friend Denny enter the orange grove, her father attempts to fix it, but it is her mother who she must turn to if there is any hope to make things right. The mother whose miscarriages in the past made bonding with Nedda hard in the first month of her life. Though she resembles her mother, it is Theo Nedda has always connected with, unaware of how bright her mother truly is. She is stunned to learn of her mother’s academic life, this mother who bakes. Through her Water cake, Betheen is able to explain the state Denny and her father are now trapped in. The machine isn’t just about loss, but preserving life for Nedda, but there are things she never knew that are now being revealed, such as the existence of a brother named Michael.

The story flows between past and present. Nedda is all grown, now living and working aboard Chawla, the reality of her girlhood dream come to fruition, she carries the chaos of that one incident like a weight, knowing only that ‘they couldn’t predict the variety of outcomes’. Predicting outcomes is the same in the future as the past. A ship with gravity… that’s what would have been ideal! Everything is going wrong, and she is still haunted by the past. The crew has sacrificed their futures to help future generations, even if it means their own deaths, on an unfamiliar planet or on a ship… There will be vision loss, things they knew were high risk, scant communication with those back on earth. It’s all for the greater good though.

I actually enjoyed the journey into the past and the dramatic moments of the Crucible, everything that happened before and after. It’s a heartbreaking novel that is about more than science, space, it is about loved ones and the instability of time, place. Dislocation of the soul. I also fancied reading about the areas I’ve grown up in and have returned to. Yes, read it.

Publication Date: May 7, 2019

Bloomsbury USA

The premise of this book was intriguing to me because the main character, Nedda, was roughly the same age as me in 1986 when Challenger exploded shortly after takeoff. As a middle school student fascinated with space exploration, I experienced the same combination of shock, sadness and devastation. And reliving it through the perspective of an entire town was quite different...in a good way. There's a lot of diversity in the characters in this book, but I found the backstories a little hard to follow and some characters (like the funeral home director) were sprinkled in without any real purpose or resolution.

What was even harder for me to grasp was the mathematical and scientific data that made up the majority of the story. I'm not a big fan of science fiction but, when it's done well, I can look past the fact that my simple mind doesn't remember the difference between sine and cosine or the principles of Newtonian physics. I just couldn't get there with this book. I wanted more of the story and less of the math. The last 100 pages took me twice as long as the first 200 and, by the last chapter, I just wanted to be done. If you're a space freak or a huge fan of science fiction, your mileage may vary.

4.5 stars
Science fiction is not a genre I typically read, but there was something about the description of this book that appealed to me. I am more than a little surprised at how much I loved it. Most of the sci-fi stuff was beyond me and while I didn’t find most of it believable, the author did a fabulous job of helping me to imagine it.

Eleven year old Nedda loves space travel and astronauts and science and her heart is broken when The Challenger crashes. Nedda’s love of space travel and her ambition to go to space is realized in this dual time narrative. The story begins from her present on a spacecraft on a journey to a planet to explore whether it could be a safe haven as the earth slowly is destructing . It moves back and forth to 1986, when she is eleven, the time of an experiment that alters time, when so much changes. Her father, a professor who has lost his job at NASA has also had his heart broken by a loss that he and Nedda’s mother have kept from her. Theo is on a mission to “extend her childhood”. “What an incredible thing it would be to hold on to that precise moment where genius was born. what an incredible thing it would be to hold on to that precise moment.” A well meaning and full of love desire, but his experiment turns into something that goes horribly wrong, affecting their entire town. The narratives connect in a way that is both beautiful and heartbreaking. This is a thought provoking story full of heart and the depth of love for one’s children that every parent knows and this is reflected in both her father Theo and her mother Betheen. There’s such humanity, the relationships and emotions are not hard to imagine at all . They are as real as they get.

While this book was on my radar and an arc already on my kindle, it was Elyse’s beautifully convincing review that moved me to read this. Here’s her review : https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2655799520?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1

I received an advanced copy of this book from Bloomsbury through NetGalley.

The story is mainly about Nedda and an incident that occurred when she was 11 years old that has shaped her entire life.
The story shifts between the present and to the past when Nedda was 11. The beginning of the book we are introduced to Nedda in the present as she is aboard a spacecraft that is headed to another planet. Her and her crewmates will set up a base there and determine if life is sustainable for human life since Earth is slowly dying.
When Nedda was younger, her scientist father created a machine that went array and had serious consequences for her small town. Her best friend Denny was also affected. The story was really compelling but just too sad for me. Nedda knows she will never return to Earth and see her family and friends. She is trying to make up for her father's mistake...it was just a bit too depressing for me to give it more stars. I received an ebook from Netgalley.com

Light from Other Stars by Erika Swyler was an interesting read. The description of the book didn't share this had an element of science fiction. Once I figured out it did, the plot all made far more sense. The story focuses on Nedda during two timeframes. First, there is 11 year old Nedda. Her father has been let go from NASA, and he is taking on projects in her basement around how to control and alter time. Then, there is Nedda as an astronaut. She is on a mission, and she is reflecting on her work and what led her there. When Nedda was 11, the Challenger tragedy happened, and by virtue of her dad, she knew those who were on the mission, so this connection is interwoven. This one was all-around intriguing, but I also wanted so much more in a good way. There were so many stories of characters that weren't told, as well as "Wait, what?" reveals where I had questions and wanted to have so many more details. This is a little off the beaten path of what I would normally read, but the relationships and connections between Nedda and her dad were quite wonderfully written. It keeps secrets and makes reveals in such a captivating way. I wasn't sure what I was getting in this one, but came out on the other side really loving what I'd read. Thanks to NetGalley for the chance to check out this read!

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 NetGalley.

Will post to Amazon upon publication

That not much I can say about this book other than it truly captures the feeling of loneliness. This is a story about women, family, fathers, sacrifice, ambition, and hope. Light from Other Stars is hearbreaking and will move you to tears.

I enjoyed Erika's Swyler's Book of Speculation, which was a bit weird, but also charming and fun. I didn't find that to be true of Light from Other Stars. I kept trying to get into this story and ended up mostly confused and not wanting to finish it. DNF @25%.

This was... strange.

I want to say first off that this just wasn’t for me, and if it wasn’t an arc, I would have DNFed it. I couldn’t get into the writing, nor the non-chronological timeline, and that threw me off. I will say that I loved Nedda as our protagonist, however she was the only character that I ever actually bonded with or related to.

The plot was strange, all-over the place, and it felt like a puzzle missing two pieces, which just happened to be the ones in the middle. The author handled exposition very weirdly, and the plot jumped around a lot, sometimes focusing on characters of seemingly no importance to the plot.

At the core of this book is a father-daughter relationship and it was... okay? It was very mediocre, and it really dragged down the novel for me. Overall, I was very disappointed.

A special thank you to NetGalley and Bloomsbury USA/Publishing for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

It is 1986 and eleven-year-old Nedda Papas is obsessed with becoming an astronaut. Her father, Theo, is a scientist who has recently been laid off from his job at NASA. Theo is being consumed by an idea of his own making as a result of never getting over the loss of his newborn son—he has invented something that will alter time.

This is a story of women, of fathers and daughters, and of sacrifice.

I've been a fan of Swyler's writing since reviewing The Mermaid Girl, which is the prequel to The Book of Speculation. While I enjoyed the exploration of the father-daughter relationship, this story missed the mark. I feel party responsible for the mediocrity I felt while reading this book because I didn't realize it was science fiction. That's not a criticism of the genre, it is just simply not for me and had I realized this, I would not have requested the book.

The story is framed in two time periods—at the time of the Challenger explosion and then in the future. It was the futuristic timeline/time in space that was disengaging and I was happy to be immersed in the earlier timeline.

What I did enjoy was the writing, there is no doubt that Swyler is a talented author, but I felt bogged down by the terminology and high level of detail and therefore was emotionally disconnected.

I can best describe this book as Contact meets A Wrinkle in Time. Nedda is a highly intelligent young girl who growing up in the 1980s and is fascinated by space exploration - and luckily she lives close to NASA, where her father once worked. Nedda's mother is a chemist who left her profession to raise children, and when an accident occurs right after the Challenger explosion, Nedda and her mother are the ones who need to figure out how to save the town. A nice blend of science fiction and fantasy with a solid story about relationships and the sacrifices we make for those we love.

I almost gave up on this book at my usual breaking point; about 30% of the way through but I am so glad I didn’t! I absolutely loved Erika Swyler’s first book and was interested in this one. It starts off kind of slow with lots of descriptions and background information. But the ending and explanations all tied it together and made it a fascainating geeky read with a great story about young friends, moms and dads and each with their children and a community coming together. .

Space obsessed, eleven year old Nedda Papas wants nothing more than to be an astronaut. This is a beautifully written science fiction book that explores space exploration and loneliness.

I stumbled across Swyler's other title, The Book of Speculation, and thoroughly enjoyed it. After a long wait for another book by her, this new novel does not disappoint. It is original, heartbreaking, and yet hopeful. The premise is frightening and yet realistic. My heart broke for Nedda and Denny, and for Betheen as well. To be truly stuck in life and then emerge and have to rediscover the world is unimaginable. Swyler's characters make it fascinating and full of hope. This an original and well-plotted story.

In this well-crafted literary sci-fi novel, Erika Swyler perfectly captures the awe and wonder we had as children about NASA and space travel. Some readers may be intimidated by the science aspects of the novel, but understanding them isn't necessary to grasping the novel for it's true purpose - the exploration of our relationships with those closest to us.