What in the giant space donut did I just read???
No, but in a good way!
This looks like it's going to be a book about marginalized identities and the price for talent of the real and raw kind and the effects of trauma and what it means to have a gift...and then the aliens show up and it goes WONKY very fast and then it turns out that it's a book about marginalized identities and the price of talent and the effects of trauma and what it means to have a gift and, most importantly, what art is FOR. And the aliens with the giant donut are absolutely integral to making that story hang together and become more than it would be otherwise.
Aoki argues, basically, to hell with Ars gratia artis: art is not for art's sake, but for OURS. Art is not merely how we save ourselves, but how we save each other. It's gloriously weird and I love that she wrote it.
And it would have worked with just music. It would have been fine. But the way that music and the culinary arts, both deliberately grabbing from outside the normal canon, build together on the importance of making something beautiful for another person was just...*chef's/conductor's kiss*.