HOW WE NAMED THE STARS, sweet first novel about first love

HOW WE NAMED THE STARS
ANDRÉS ORDORICA
Tin House
$17.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Set between the United States and México, Andrés N. Ordorica’s debut novel is a tender and lyrical exploration of belonging, grief, and first love―a love story for those so often written off the page.

When Daniel de La Luna arrives as a scholarship student at an elite East Coast university, he bears the weight of his family’s hopes and dreams, and the burden of sharing his late uncle’s name. Daniel flounders at first―but then Sam, his roommate, changes everything. As their relationship evolves from brotherly banter to something more intimate, Daniel soon finds himself in love with a man who helps him see himself in a new light.

But just as their relationship takes flight, Daniel is pulled away, first by Sam’s hesitation and then by a brutal turn of events that changes Daniel’s life forever. As he grapples with profound loss, Daniel finds himself in his family’s ancestral homeland in México for the summer, finding joy in this setting even as he struggles to come to terms with what’s happened and faces a host of new

How does the person he is connect with this place his family comes from? How is his own story connected to his late uncle’s? And how might he reconcile the many parts of himself as he learns to move forward? Equal parts tender and triumphant, Andrés N. Ordorica’s How We Named the Stars is a debut novel of love, heartache, redemption, and learning to honor the dead; a story of finding the strength to figure out who you are―and who you could be―if only the world would let you.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Books about first love are, I think we can all agree, among the most relatable stories there are. Everyone not a sociopath has had a First Love. We can all recall the feelings, the sensations, the sheer exhilaration of falling in love for the first time, and I suspect most of us not sociopaths also recall the returned love from the one we just fell in love with, even if not the first time. So, when choosing a story to tell, a debut novelist really starts out on a higher slope if they choose first...and for added charm forbidden...love.

What a shame I was not utterly ensorcelled by this iteration of the story.

I suspect some of this is due to the author's use of the character's journal as a narrative frame. This necessitates alternating first- and second-person narratives, sometimes in the same sentence; I assume this was an attempt to create a sense of immediacy unavailable in third-person omniscient narration. What happened instead was a sense of muddledness, a lack of clear character-building through different, or just differentiated, voices. The result was that I felt like this was an audiobook. Someone reading to me, unless I am in love with him, makes me utterly fuddled, and sends me into a defensive coma. It took me two weeks to read this not-very-long book.

My last critical comments are about the use of description: I am a lot less interested in rocks than the author appears to be. Is the color green talismanic for some reason? Why? If I am not given a hook to hang my response on, all it does, when a motif is repeated like the use of green is here, is start feeling like I am missing something. That is never a good thing.

So, for the sin of writing a first novel without some very firm editorial guidance, I docked stars. But that said, there are things I loved about this tale. I was particularly pleased that Spanish appeared throughout the read. The chapter titles being in Spanish when Daniel is in Mexico was a lovely touch, and offered me a distinctively culture-specific frame for those chapters. Daniel feeling his way through the bewildering maze of the US culture, through the school's culture, and through his forbidden love for another man, was absolutely terrific. It was, at times, unfocused due to the issues I mentioned above, but never so much so that I was unaware that Daniel...and Sam...were enmeshed in their emotional growth into love. Self-love, as always, has to precede lasting love for others. That is the universal agony of first gay loves, I fear.

Speaking of which...Sam being seen in all his waffling glory only through Daniel's eyes was, at first, odd...back the narrative framework issue...but ended up feeling so exactly like the first-love malaise that I quickly began to warm to it. First love is, of necessity, solipsistic. We can never really get out of that self-referential stage of being in love with love until, and unless, we go all the way through it. Daniel going home to stay with his abuelo and delve into his namesake uncle's life and times was a really suitable way to guide him through the thicket of his self-absorption. His emotional flowering struck me as both truthful and effective...I believed it, and I believed he was changed in the ways shown, by the discoveries he made.

While I am on the subject, I feel the necessity to address a critique of the author's handling of societal homophobia that I have seen brought up several times. It can seem as though the inevitable experience of others’ hateful judgments of himself and of Sam were lightly brushed off. I did not read them this way. As the novel is framed as a journal, the lack of sustained responses to and obsessions with homopohbia struck me as Daniel having, developing, and imparting to the more-affected Sam, a sense of homophobia being an external not internal problem...something imposed from outside. That is exactly how I think homophobia *should* be perceived. It is only a problem for one when one is interacting with the homohobes. That is a major positive in my opinion of the read because it shows the need to decenter the hate.

A mixed reading experience, one with major positives and a bunch of small negatives. A first novel, I hope not an only novel, from a man whose emotional journey is, quite clearly, only beginning, and which I am glad I can share.