How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky: A Novel
Lydia Netzer (Facebook) (Twitter)
Audiobook read by Joshilyn Jackson
St. Martin’s Press (June 2014), Hardcover (ISBN 1250047021 / 9781250047021)
Fiction, 352 pages
Source: Purchased audiobook (Macmillan Audio, June 2014, ISBN 9781250047021/Audible ASIN B00K7KNEAG)
Author Lydia Netzer is good at succinctly describing her own novels. This is how she summarizes How to Tell Toledo From the Night Sky on her website:
“Two astronomers meet and fall in love, only to find out that their mothers knew each other as children, planned for them to be soulmates, raised them to be perfect for each other, and then orchestrated their meeting. The book is about fate and determinism, science and faith, and asks the question: what is love?”
It’s not quite as pithy as her description of her debut, Shine Shine Shine. I found that novel intriguingly offbeat, if not completely successful, and was interested in seeing how the author would follow it up. I found How to Tell Toledo From the Night Sky less intriguing, less offbeat, and ultimately less successful than its predecessor.
Kathy of BermudaOnion shared the creation stories of both novels in a post about an author event with Netzer:
“Lydia’s first book took her ten years to write. She poured her heart and soul into it and wondered what else she had to write about. Luckily for her readers, Lydia remembered a conversation she had with another mother at a 2001 playdate with her son when they joked about raising their kids to be the perfect mates for each other.
“She originally wrote How to Tell Toledo From the Night Sky without dialogue. It lacked something so she rewrote the same story as a screenplay and it was all dialogue. She was able to weave the two together to create her second novel.”
It’s not obvious–to me, at least–what came from the straight-narrative draft and what came from the screenplay, but learning how the novel was constructed helped me understand why its flow felt a bit “off” to me at times, with spots of choppy and repetitive prose. I also think that Netzer is trying to tackle a lot thematically here, and that those ambitions got in the way of the storytelling sometimes. I think the question of whether two people can be literally “made for each other” is a good one to explore in fiction; perhaps …Toledo… should have stayed more focused on that central idea–and somewhat less focused on sex. I realize that’s strictly a matter of personal preference, but to my taste, the sex scenes in the novel were too numerous, too detailed, and not really all that sexy.
I wouldn’t call Netzer a science-fiction writer, but she writes fiction about characters who do science, and the science is a significant part of their stories; that appeals to me. I also appreciate that her characters are highly nerdy, but in a well-rounded way. (Yes, that’s a thing. I consider myself a well-rounded nerd.) That said, I didn’t especially like most of the characters in …Toledo…, and that made it tougher for me to become invested in their stories. I don’t know if I would have felt differently if I’d read this one in print; while I’ve liked my previous experiences with Joshilyn Jackson as an audiobook narrator, I just didn’t care much for her voice characterizations here, and I’m sure that colored my response to the characters themselves.
There were a couple of times I considered abandoning this audiobook, to be honest. I didn’t, but I’m afraid this one was a disappointment.
Book description, from the publisher’s website
Like a jewel shimmering in a Midwest skyline, the Toledo Institute of Astronomy is the nation’s premier center of astronomical discovery and a beacon of scientific learning for astronomers far and wide. Here, dreamy cosmologist George Dermont mines the stars to prove the existence of God. Here, Irene Sparks, an unsentimental scientist, creates black holes in captivity.
George and Irene are on a collision course with love, destiny and fate. They have everything in common: both are ambitious, both passionate about science, both lonely and yearning for connection. The air seems to hum when they’re together. But George and Irene’s attraction was not written in the stars. In fact their mothers, friends since childhood, raised them separately to become each other’s soulmates. When that long-secret plan triggers unintended consequences, the two astronomers must discover the truth about their destinies, and unravel the mystery of what Toledo holds for them—together or, perhaps, apart.
From Chapter One:
“At the time her mother fell down the stairs to her death in Toledo, Irene was far away in Pittsburgh, working in a lab. As her mother bounced down a flight of stairs in a bright city on the sparkling shore of Lake Erie, Irene sat in a dark room, in the basement of an ugly building, in a drab university, in an abandoned steel town. Irene’s mother was named Bernice. They had not spoken to each other in years.
“Irene pulled her lab coat around her and stared intently into a small glass window on a large metal apparatus. She wasn’t thinking about her mother at all. In fact, all she was thinking about was her work. As her mother landed at the bottom of the stairs, arms and legs cracking, Irene concentrated only on recording the data from her machine. All of her recent days had been spent alone, just like this, compressed into the space in her own head. Yes, she had a boyfriend, a mother, a boss. But there was her and there was everything else. There was her and there was the world. She had a reason for this.”
