Celine Ong's Reviews > A Scatter of Light

“all at once i could see who i was becoming as opposed to who i once was. i was split in two: my future and my past. i wanted to remain here on the edge between by two selves, doubly exposed, all hunger and heart.”

halfway through a scatter of light i started reeling, with my only thought being an emphatic “fuck”. this was not what i had expected. then i thought “okay let’s run with it” & now i’m stuck in emotional limbo; cracked wide open.

let me go back. aria tang west knows who she is. after a party goes wrong, she gets exiled to the california bay area to stay with her artist grandmother, joan. there she meets steph, her grandmother’s gardener who shows her a new world of art, people, & the queer community during the first major legalisation of gay marriage. suddenly aria doesn’t quite know who is she or what she wants to be anymore.

a scatter of light is billed as telegraph club’s companion piece but truthfully? it’s strong enough to hold it’s own. its the queer past meets queer present & future, with that connecting thread of something larger than all of us—lily sends her love along a telegraph wire; aria sends her love in a brushstroke.

i feel destined to love this book. so much of it revolves around women’s creativity and lesbian artists. i see myself as a twenty-something retired artist, now as someone who wants to write about art. art is timeless; art is connection. what you create is going to end up affecting people you don’t know & have never met. that’s the beauty of it, isn’t it? that you keep creating & going because you never know who you’ll affect?

circling back, i said this book was unexpected. grief books are my favorite sub-genre & i had not expect this to fall into the category. but it did. a pleasant surprise. it takes the heavy weight of first loves & first loss, of falling in love with someone you never expected to & someone you shouldn’t. then paints it with a brushstroke through through the stars, through the flash of a disposable lens, through yellowed newspaper clippings.

how could i not fall in love?

✼ thank you to PRH international for sending me an arc of a scatter of light in exchange for an honest review

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initial thoughts:

fuck.

4.5