Mike Chen

The setup puts us in familiar enough territory (and this really is all setup; we learn this within the first twenty pages or so): Fifteen years ago, the Shao family was on a camping trip when college senior Jakob disappeared, and he hasn't been seen or heard from since. Jakob's father, Arnold, and younger sister Evie believed that he had been kidnapped and was not responsible for his disappearance; mother Sofia and Jakob's twin sister Kassie thought he was being typically irresponsible and show more that he was most likely dead, having overdosed on some drug or other.

Arnold died not too long after Jakob's disappearance, and the family rift grew to the point that Evie hasn't spoken to her mother or sister in several years. So Kass gets quite a shock when Evie shows up on her doorstep followed a few minutes later by the arrival of (mirabile dictu!) Jakob.

And we think we know what to expect from that premise. We're in for buried resentments and trauma coming to the surface, siblings who've been out of touch since youth trying to figure out what their adult relationships might look like, new appreciation of one another's skills and gifts. And that is pretty much what we get.

But.

The reason for Jakob's disappearance -- and again, this is all chapter one stuff, so not remotely spoilery -- is that he was abducted by aliens, and has spent the last fifteen years helping the Seven Bells army fight the voracious Awakened empire. His return to Earth is only temporary, and should he fail in his mission, Earth is likely to be the next planet to be destroyed by the Awakened. And the divisions in the Shao family stem from the fact that Evie was the only one who believed Arnold when he told them that Jakob had been taken by aliens.

It's not that unusual to see "literary" authors downplaying the fact that they've written a science fiction or fantasy novel, running from the label as fast as they can, insisting that their book isn't part of that vaguely childish and disreputable genre nonsense. Genre fiction gets hidden beneath the respectable cloak of literature all the time. But we don't often see the process work the other way around as it does here. Chen has written a fairly mainstream family drama, and is hiding it under the cloak of SF.

I'm not saying that SF readers will be (or have been) disappointed by this book. Chen has been quite successful -- he's published six novels now (plus a few sharecropping books in the Star Wars and Star Trek franchises) -- working variations on this idea, and he's good at it. But the tones and genres don't always blend well, and every time we cut from the sisters arguing about the future care of their aging mother to Jakob's attempts to turn on the broken brain transmitter that will tell his alien comrades where he is -- well, it's a bit jarring.

Chen is published by Mira, an imprint of Harlequin that they use for non-romance fiction. I would love to know how much of his readership is SF readers who came for the "I joined an alien army" story, and how much is "literary" readers who came for the family dynamics. It's an odd niche that Chen has carved out for himself. I don't always find his books entirely successful, but he's attempting something distinctive, and the attempt is interesting enough that I keep coming back to his work. show less

Well-developed characters and a crisply-moving plot make this time-travel tale an engaging, rewarding read. If you grant Chen the future-reality of time-travel, the underlying mechanisms of controlling access and managing those who would change history for their own benefit are well-thought-out and logical.

Chen doesn’t go for the standby plotline here – no one is trying to prevent Lincoln’s assassination or create a fatal “accident” for an adolescent Hitler. The plot revolves show more around Kin Stewart, a “time-cop”, if you will, whose job is to go backward in the Alpha timeline of his universe and apprehend or eliminate the meddlers who are mostly attempting to enrich their 22nd-century selves by jiggering 21st-century business deals. When he is injured in one of these attempts, the device meant to return him to his own timeline is damaged, and he’s stuck in 1996 with no way home.

The meat of the story gets rolling 18 years later, when another agent from Temporal Control (where only 14 days have passed in the Alpha timeline) shows up to collect him. The problem is, Kin has built a life in his new here-and-now, which includes a wife and daughter, and going “home” means leaving them behind, forever. His struggles to deal with living in two mutually incompatible realities and his attempts to make things right both with the daughter he feels he abandoned and the responsibilities of his Alpha timeline life lead him to make decisions which will endanger both.

The characters are all nicely done, and Chen keeps the time-loop anomalies to a minimum while still predicating multiple futures for Kin’s 21st-century family, each one based on how or whether he is able to reach back through time to influence events.

The success of the story’s conclusion will depend on the reader’s ability to wrap their mind around some of the odder possibilities of time travel. This reader found it a unique and wonderful sleight-of-hand that utilized nuggets buried early in the text. Nicely done, Mr. Chen! show less

Light Years From Home is about a family that has been fractured since the disappearance of Jakob. With his reappearance, the past comes rushing back, and so do all the negative emotions and thoughts tied up with him. But his reappearance, no matter how desperate he is to get back to where he came from, offers hope to his family, and I really loved how this is more a story of family than it is about an intergalactic war. There’s a large psychology piece to this story that I really loved, show more and I enjoyed how it twisted everything in the middle so I really had no idea where the story was going. There are high stakes and enemies coming after them, but, through it all, Light Years From Home manages to be a beautiful story of family and understanding oneself.

Extended Thoughts
The Shao family hasn’t been the same since Jakob vanished with his father 15 years ago, and only his dad returned. Left to pick up the pieces, sisters Kassie, who is also Jakob’s twin sister, and Evie, their younger sister, set themselves on different tracks. With their father’s obsession over finding Jakob and trying to figure out how to use a piece of alien technology, nothing is ever quite the same and an already fractured family threatens to break further.

Fifteen years later, Kassie is a psychologist living with her mother who is slowly descending deeper into dementia. Evie is a vet tech on the other side of the country working with a group called the Reds who investigates anything alien-related. When data suggests Jakob might be back, Evie decides to travel back home, unprepared and not at all ready for the family reunion about to happen that could break them forever or finally heal them.

The thing I love most about Mike Chen’s books is just how much humanness and heart is in them. Light Years From Home is no exception and really focused on family. While I wasn’t really into the fact that this one has aliens and alien abduction, I found it wasn’t really focused on that as much as I expected. This novel is almost completely set on Earth and mostly swirls around one family and how alien abduction impacted them. It’s beautiful and heartfelt with a lot of pain under the surface, and the ending, while I wanted just a little more, was absolutely perfect and fitting for the family.

Light Years From Home focuses on the Shao family: Mom and Dad (Sofia and Arnold), Kassie, Jakob, and Evie. There are also some other fun characters, like Evie’s friend Layla from the Reds who tells some punny science jokes and Mom’s caretaker Lucy. But it really focuses on the Shao family and how Jakob’s sudden disappearance impacted them for 15 years. It was great to see how they were split between believing the best and the worst of Jakob and how it splintered them. Their family was fractured and seriously hurting and even I had my doubts as to whether or not they could pull together and do something about Jakob’s reappearance and what it means for an intergalactic war they know nothing of.

Most of Light Years From Home is told by Kassie and Evie. As Jakob’s sisters, they have vastly different views and memories of him. I really liked how they knocked heads over it and how it further rent the family in half. But they’re deeper than that. Both have their own underlying issues that have built up over the years as their brother’s disappearance took their toll on them, and it was fun to see it play out. The sisters are very different from each other, practically opposites, but family is family. I loved how achingly awkward and difficult their reunion was and there were so many steps backwards and forwards, but they really did feel like real sisters to me. I liked that Kassie, as the oldest, suddenly took responsibility and just shouldered everything without any discussion and I liked that Evie held such hope and optimism. Watching them dance around each other was wonderful and just felt so full of heart that they couldn’t be anything but family that still loves each other.

Jakob’s story wasn’t as full as I had hoped or expected, but, considering I’m not a fan of aliens and his story line is the one that involves aliens, I did end up enjoying it. I liked that the reader gets to know him from before his disappearance through his sisters, and then the reader is put into his perspective and suddenly things look a little different and there’s a lot more to him than meets the eye. I liked him, but was also kind of frustrated with him and the things he did even if they did make sense. His is also the perspective I wanted more from, but I think much more might have watered down the story too much, taking away from the story of the sisters and one family trying to mend itself.

But my favorite part was the mental health piece. Since my own background is in psychology, I really liked that Kassie is a psychologist and her work came into play several times throughout the story. It clouded some of what she did and sometimes I wished she could just calm down, but she always felt like she was an inch away from just blowing up for most of the book, which was fun and had me keeping a wary eye on her. Anyways, I really liked that it came in handy and played well into the family dynamics. It made the whole middle part both really wonderful and kind of a let down. But I loved how it made me question everything from the characters to the story. I also really liked the portrayal of dementia. It’s confusing and disorienting and so tough and I felt Light Years From Home really captured it well. I also liked that the way it was handled at the end wasn’t jarring, but made sense and really added something lovely to the family.

The story itself is about the intergalactic war Jakob is involved in and his overwhelming need to just get back and the impact his disappearance had on his family. Every step of the way, I felt Jakob’s need, but I also felt those strong, but strained family bonds. While Jakob’s story really drove the plot and kept it moving, Light Years From Home is really about the family. I loved how broken it was, how strained their relationships were, and how, despite that, the story was able to reach the kind of beautiful and soft ending I’ve come to expect from Chen’s novels. It’s a beautiful story of family.

Light Years From Home certainly had it’s slow and not quite as interesting parts, but the raw human emotions, the hope, the despair, really kept me hooked. It offers a story of family wrapped up in alien abduction, intergalactic wars, and a desperate father. I loved almost everything about it, but I really loved how heartfelt and human Chen’s novels are, and I especially loved the focus on family instead of the aliens.

Thank you to Justine Sha at MIRA for a review copy . All opinions expressed are my own. show less

Real Rating: 3.75* of five, rounded up because I will read his next one

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, show more 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. show less