LIGHT YEARS FROM HOME, a poignant story of the cost of being where you fit not belong

LIGHT YEARS FROM HOME
MIKE CHEN
MIRA Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$12.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Every family has issues. Most can’t blame them on extraterrestrials.

Evie Shao and her sister, Kass, aren’t on speaking terms. Fifteen years ago on a family camping trip, their father and brother vanished. Their dad turned up days later, dehydrated and confused—and convinced he'd been abducted by aliens. Their brother, Jakob, remained missing. The women dealt with it very differently. Kass, suspecting her college-dropout twin simply ran off, became the rock of the family. Evie traded academics to pursue alien conspiracy theories, always looking for Jakob.

When Evie's UFO network uncovers a new event, she goes to investigate. And discovers Jakob is back. He's different—older, stranger, and talking of an intergalactic war—but the tensions between the siblings haven't changed at all. If the family is going to come together to help Jakob, then Kass and Evie are going to have to fix their issues, and fast. Because the FBI is after Jakob, and if their brother is telling the truth, possibly an entire space armada, too.

The perfect combination of action, imagination and heart, Light Years From Home is a touching drama about a challenge as difficult as saving the galaxy: making peace with your family…and yourself.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Every damn word of this is so heartfelt, so honest and so completely resonant with my Kassie-like self that I feel like a rotter for not giving it that fourth star. But yet again, sexuality (Evie's probably Lesbian or Bisexual) is window-dressed onto an otherwise complete character. Please stop doing that.

When Arnold, the family patriarch (and doesn't he just know it!) disappears with Jakob, the underperforming (according to Arnold) son, the whole family flies into a state of emergency! Then Arnold comes back from that camping trip, without Jakob, but with a Purpose: Find him and bring him home.

No matter what, no matter who gets hurt or slighted.

So the family is broken again, not re-broken but the existing broken structure is smashed on a new rock. That rock is a vanished son...who returns one day! But what baggage he drags...and what a life he's led...and what his sisters had to put up with...and what they're coping with now.... And, as I am sure you've tipped to by now, this isn't a seamless, straight-through narrative. There are flashbacks!

Every single soul in this narrative has reasons for what they have done that do not depend on what the others did or didn't do. However, as in all toxic families, they blame each other publicly and themselves privately. Jakob made it easy for his twin sister to avoid the tough parts of growing up by leaving her the job of fulfilling the family's expectations. That'll make anyone angry! His little sister, growing up in the vacancy left by a father whose obsession with his lost son is all-consuming, opts out of sane, mainstream society...and this puts yet more pressure on her older sister. Then, wouldn't you just know, Dad dies! And Mom gets dementia!

I think it was around here that I went inside my emotional hidey-hole for a while. It's a lot. I related to Kassie. I was angry with Jakob for...vanishing...without a word. (I mean, come on! He can come back now, but he couldn't send some sort of interplanetary post card? "Having a wonderful war, be glad you aren't here" or something?) But that doesn't put the blame on him, Kassie, the way you want it to...you chose your path, and everyone has choices. Yes, some are harder to make than others, but they're still within the realm of possibility. A thing you, in your faithlessness, have every reason to know....

So this is sci fi? Well...yyyeeesss, but in a curious way no. It's what happens in the space opera between the acts. The messy human bits of the story that get elided over when you're telling the Ultimate Battle of Good Versus Evil!!! and the Hero is tasked with getting {thing} from his home, and whee! he comes back with {thing} and a story about his father being dead. Well, this is what actually happened then!

What makes the story compulsively readable for me is that quality, that interstitial nature. I am always interested in what occurs between the acts. I was not as interested in the seemingly grafted-on piece about the FBI thinking Jakob had run off to become a terrorist...Jakob?! lazy schlub that he was?!...but I can see how it felt timely for young Mister Shao to be branded as something he clearly could never bring himself to be. In a very odd way, though, I guess he did become a violent actor. Just not on Earth. Which, funnily enough, makes it okay...? Or does it?

Kassie's point-of-view narration is cringe-inducingly spot-on for the judgmental left-behind Responsible One's angle. It wasn't fun for me, but it was so real that at times I had to go look and make sure I was still an old, white man and hadn't transmogrified into Kassie Shao. So well done, Author Chen...sort of.

I don't think for a minute that the sci-fi elements will pass muster among the die-hard fans of the genre. They really aren't made for those readers. So if you're a hard SF reader, don't come here with those expectations. This is the moving, affecting, real story of one family's emotional dysfunction over the course of fifteen long, hard, lonely years of alienation and isolation, and the reason for it is science-fictional in nature.

I honestly wondered why I was so caught up in this family cess pit when the Universe is in danger out there! The first part makes you believe that Jakob's quest is URGENT and REAL and then...his sisters kludge onto him, Evie in a credulous, uncritical way and Kassie with her trademark judgment and blame (and she's a therapist?! Yikes), and suddenly it's possible that this is reality and Jakob's just not in it with us.

It gave my reading a focus, a real sense of the stakes, for the story to be presented in this way, though I would've predicted it to have been otherwise. Author Chen's work, which I've been reading for years now, has always made itself a home on my devices because he visibly grows with each published work. I haven't always liked his growing pains, but I appreciate that he is clear about what it is he needs to do and always tries to do it better every time. That he succeeds is a testament to his talent.