This was a lovely, heartfelt and moving read. A thoughtful coming of age novel that captured the pain and beauty of recognising your sexuality and navigating love and relationships, but taken to greater depths of emotion with its discussion and treatment of death, grief, and the second generation immigrant experience.

I found the narrative very effective. It is written as a letter by the protagonist Daniel to his dead love Sam (this is stated in the first pages, no spoiler!) Interspersed with diary entries from his uncle 40 years prior, and these gave the novel a very open and emotionally direct tone. This worked very well with the themes of the novel and helped to make it a very immersive read.

Both Daniel and Sam were very well developed characters, I did wish there had been a little more with some of the secondary characters though, especially a major one in the second half who seemed to move from angel to evil in a couple of pages. I think it was supposed to be more representative of Daniel's fluctuating feelings and a not entirely reliable narrator, but it felt a little off to me. But aside from this, I really enjoyed the book and thoroughly recommend it.

*I received a free ARC and I have chosen to leave a review*

How We Named The Stars is the debut novel by Ordorica, about a Mexican American boy who goes to college and falls in love, and then has deal with heartbreak and loss. Daniel de La Luna moves from California to Ithaca, New York to start college, where he, feeling out of place, meets his new roommate, athletic Sam. Despite seeming like the opposite of Daniel, they quickly become close, and then in love, as the first year of college speeds away from them, but by the end of the year, they are separated. Daniel's summer in Mexico unearths his family's past, and then tragedy forces Daniel to reckon with the dead.

Having read Ordorica's poetry, I was excited for this novel, and it surpassed my expectations, as a tender coming of age novel that explores how to move forward with heartbreak and grief, drawing strength from family and friends and a sense of queer community that spans time. It is told as Daniel's recollections, narrating to Sam, with each chapter started by a diary snippet from Daniel's uncle, who died before he was born. Through this perspective, you find out early on what happens at the tragic climax of the book, so the narrative is built around getting there, and then moving past it. Unlike some coming of age books featuring death and grief, this one felt complex and careful, asking what it means to keep going on living, especially when someone dies young.

There's also a fantastic sense of queer community throughout the novel, from Daniel immediately finding gay friends when he starts college to ideas of cross-generational community even when you cannot ever meet someone. Even though it is romantic love at the centre of the book, it is also very much about queer friendship and about different kinds of friendship and love between people, and about learning about those as you grow up. At the same time, it is also about finding people like you, as Daniel is constantly realising how vital it is for him to find both people and writing that go beyond the straight, White experience.

Both the college and Mexico settings are vividly realised and this is a bittersweet book that doesn't wallow in tragedy, but instead depicts sadness, love, and healing in a multifaceted way. How We Named The Stars is a gripping novel powered by character that feels like the next part of the lineage of queer coming of age literary fiction.

I'm obsessed with this book! Beautifully written, being able to step into the world of Daniel and Sam for a little while was an absolute joy.

Ordorica navigates the journeys of grief, adulthood and exploring queerness in a thoughtful and sensitive way, with his poetry background shining through in this beautiful novel.

Warning, you will cry.. (and want to go back for more!)

This is a very assured debut novel dealing with large issues, of first love, of loss, of the weight of the past, of hope in the undiscovered. It is not without faults-the lushness of language and intensity of emotion sometimes reaches over-ripeness and tips into hysteria-yet overall it conveys accurately and fearlessly the ache and uncertainty of first love with rawness, tenderness and perspicacity.

I was reminded at times of two very different authors for very different reasons. The richness of description had echoes of Evelyn Waugh in “Brideshead Revisited” for instance in this passage:

“Just as we were gearing up to head home, the two wrens took off in flight. Their warbles echoed against the stark silence, their brown feathers fluttered bright against the snow, but it was something else that kept me looking at them as we made our way back down the footbridge: the way they were flying side by side, the tips of their wings just touching. It was as if they were holding hands in the air, searching together, trying to find their place in that city on the hill.”

At other times it was Alan Hollinghurst I heard, in the awkwardness of passion felt but unconsummated and in passion messily requited.

I am rarely moved to tears by works of fiction but this brought back to mind so intensely some aspects of my own experiences more than fifty years ago of trying to negotiate and make sense of my feelings for other men and theirs for me. As the author says:

“…but now, as an adult, I was starting to understand that life was a matter of deciding what to keep alive and what to let die. Personal dreams, family ranches, first loves, summer flings—all these things have a life span. As much as I was learning to let go, I was also learning to welcome new knowledge into my life.”

The best compliment one can give to a writer and their work is that one was left wishing for more. I hope it will not be too long before I can read another novel from this gifted writer.

4.5 stars.

A stunning debut, How We Named the Stars explores first love and first loss in stunning prose that will sit with the reader long after the last page.

This novel contains so much, Daniel is a first generation college student, the only one of Mexican heritage in his classes, on a scholarship he fears losing, far from his family, and is just beginning to explore and understand his sexuality. Questions of identity, belonging, generational grief are all examined and explored with a gentle yet powerful hand by Ordorica - resulting in a breathtaking debut novel from an author who I am sure will write some wonderful things over the course of his career.

My one small criticism would be the dialogue and some interactions between the characters. Daniel seems to walk through his interactions with other characters a little too easily in some instances and the dialogue seems clipped and simple - to the point where the characters all seemed to speak with the same voice. But this could easily be explained by the fact the whole novel is told through Daniel’s recollections (with the exception of excerpts from his uncle’s writings). I’m not sure if this was a stylistic choice, or due to this being a first novel in which the author is still finding his stylistic feet so to speak.