How We Named the Stars

How We Named the Stars is a novel by the writer Andrés N. Ordorica, published in 2024 by Saraband. Its narrator is a scholarship student from a family for whom his place at an elite university on the east coast is the sum of their ambitions.

Daniel de La Luna arrives on campus carrying two things that were not really his choice: his family's hopes and the name of his late uncle, whose place in the family story he has inherited without ever meeting him. The first months are disorienting and the fit is poor until Sam, his roommate, makes the strange place navigable. What begins as the easy back-and-forth of two young men sharing a room becomes something more intimate, and Daniel falls in love with the person who has helped him see himself differently.

The book is written as a first-person account of that year, with the pull between the life a family has planned and the life a student discovers for himself at the centre of it.