*This review does not contain spoilers.
My husband had a difficult time convincing me this book wasn’t actually scary. He read it first, so I kept checking in, “Are you sure this isn’t a horror story?” He assured me it wasn’t. He was right. Mostly. Light from Distant Stars by Shawn Smucker is the perfect level of suspense for a light-weight like me. Thrilling, but not too gory. Scary, but not nightmare-inducing.
Through disarming prose and complex characters, Smucker entertains readers with a thought-provoking, engrossing story. Switching back and forth in time between the young and middle-aged protagonist, Cohen, Smucker guides the reader to explore the problem begging for answers: Who (or what) attacked Cohen’s father while he was at work in the morgue? (And the unspoken question: Did Cohen attempt to murder his own father?)
If you’ve read Smucker’s first young adult novel called The Day the Angels Fell, this book has some of the same shadowy parallels as he explores themes of death, guilt, the parent-child relationship, and the fears we struggle to overcome. While this novel is geared more toward adults, mature teens would also enjoy this story. Light from Distant Stars is the kind of novel that carries you away in the story and you don’t want to stop until you get some answers. The last quarter of the book kept me turning pages late into the night. Throughout the book, I kept asking myself, “Do I believe Cohen?” “What is reality?” and “Do I trust Cohen’s memories?”
And as for my husband’s confidence that this was not a thriller, I have to say I disagree. If it were a film, I’d put it at the Sixth Sense-level of spookiness. But even though the story concluded with plenty of unanswered questions, Light from Distant Stars was an entertaining, nuanced, and a satisfying read. The books that leave unanswered questions are usually the ones that keep us thinking for ourselves long after we’ve finished the book.
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