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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.
"[R]aw and bittersweet...Aria's vulnerable narration is an intensely driving force in this expansive tale of yearning, self-discovery, and first love." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Aria's story is...about what it means to be an artist, a friend, a daughter and a granddaughter, and about how identities of all kinds can converge and crystallize as part of the process of growing up." - BookPage (starred review)
"The plot and setting are richly detailed, but readers will wish for deeper exploration of the characters' emotional lives, which would have strengthened the romance and family drama. A contemporary queer coming-of-age story steeped in pivotal events." - Kirkus Reviews
"A Scatter of Light is not one but many love letters—to art, to first crushes, and to friendships that span decades and ground you while letting you grow." - Booklist
"This deeply perceptive bildungsroman thoughtfully explores several absorbing topics, but first and foremost it is an intimate, exhilarating story of first love." - Horn Book
This information about A Scatter of Light was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: © Sharona Jacobs
Malinda Lo is the critically acclaimed author of several young adult novels, including most recently A Line in the Dark, which was a Kirkus Best YA Book of 2017 and one of Vulture's 10 Best YA Books of 2017. Her novel Ash, a lesbian retelling of Cinderella, was a finalist for the William C. Morris YA Debut Award, the Andre Norton Award for YA Science Fiction and Fantasy, the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award, and was a Kirkus Best Book for Children and Teens. She has been a three-time finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Malinda's nonfiction has been published by the New York Times Book Review, NPR, the Huffington Post, The Toast, the Horn Book, and the anthologies Here We Are, How I Resist, and Scratch. She lives in Massachusetts with her wife.
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