The Prettiest Star

Locations
Call Number: Adult Book / Fiction / Historical / Sickels, Carter
On Shelf At: Pittsfield Branch

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Pittsfield Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / Historical / Sickels, Carter	4-week checkout	On Shelf

"Small-town Appalachia doesn't have a lot going for it, but it's where Brian is from, where his family is, and where he's chosen to return to die. At eighteen, Brian, like so many other promising young gay men, arrived in New York City without much more than a love for the freedom and release from his past that it promised. But within six short years, AIDS would claim his lover, his friends, and his future. With nothing left in New York but memories of death, Brian decides to write his mother a letter asking to come back to the place, and family, he was once so desperate to escape. Set in 1986, a year after Rock Hudson's death shifted the public consciousness of the epidemic and brought the news of AIDS into living rooms and kitchens across America, The Prettiest Star is part Dog Years by Mark Doty and part Tell the Wolves I'm Home by Carol Rifka Brunt. But it is also an urgent story now: it a novel about the politics and fragility of the body; it is a novel about sex and shame. And it is a novel that speaks to the question of what home and family means when we try to forge a life for ourselves in a world that can be harsh and unpredictable. It is written at the far reaches of love and understanding, and zeroes in on the moments where those two forces reach for each other, and sometimes touch."-- Provided by publisher.

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Heartbreaking submitted by chfairey on July 21, 2021, 12:08pm A novel powered by an unstoppable momentum and open-hearted perspective inclusion. Brian is the core sympathetic character, but the author extends understanding through first-person perspective to his mother, his sister, and even, at the end, his father. Moving, reminiscent of a specific time and place, and a brilliant ode to the lost generation that suffered from the AIDS epidemic.