The Sound of Stars

The Sound of Stars (2020) by Alechia Dow blew me away! I wish I remembered how I found out about it, given that it’s been out nearly 4 years and I want to read more just like it.

Ellie (Janelle) Baker is 17, living in a building in New York with her parents, after an alien invasion killed nearly one-third of the human population. The Ilori run on electricity, and human expression of emotions is grounds for execution. Ellie’s father has been given medication to make him docile, and he works for the Ilori. Her mother spends most of her time in an alcoholic haze because of the situation. And Ellie does what she is supposed to, except for the fact that she hid a stash of novels in their basement storage area and now runs an illicit lending library.

One day one of her novels goes missing, and she is terrified she has been found out, and in a way, she has. But the Ilori guard who found her novel is unusual. M0Rr1S (I will refer to him as Morris) is obsessed with human music and once he reads the novel, he cannot get enough of human stories, either. The Ilori have a hive-mind, so Morris has to erect a sort of screen so that the rest of the Ilori don’t know what he’s up to.

Morris saves Ellie from execution, and they have to go on a road trip to maintain the charade that he needs her for the vaccine he is in charge of creating–the vaccine that turns humans into docile workers like Ellie’s father. We also find out that the Ilori are in a stratified society, with an underclass of labmade workers like Morris who are there to prepare Earth for the true Ilori. The true Ilori will use Earth as a sort of vacation spot, and upload each ones’ consciousness into the human hosts that remain in captivity on Earth. When done, they will leave the human as a husk.

Ellie describes herself as a “weird black girl who has books as friends.” She also has anxiety, needs thyroid medication, and considers herself on the asexual spectrum and pansexual romantically. What we don’t find out until the latter part of the book is that Ellie is also fat!

Woven throughout are pop culture references to a K-Pop-type group called The Starry Eyed. Their lyrics and interviews are peppered throughout, as are references to the music Morris loves, and the books and stories Ellie tells him as they are on their road trip, encountering other Ilori and humans in hiding, and narrowly escaping both.

I absolutely loved it–the idea that stories and music are what is really important–and the star-crossed love between a human and an alien. My only critique is that I wanted more–I felt that the author was setting it up for a sequel, but the books she’s written since then are not sequels!

I consider it fat-positive, as Ellie talks about her size matter-of-factly and not in a negative way, and Morris tells her that he finds her very attractive.