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, 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.
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He went out with his camcorder. APRIL 20, 1986, NEW YORK CITY
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(@HubCityPress, 25 May 2021, ebook, 342 pages, borrowed from @GlasgowLib via @OverDriveInc, # POPSUGARReadingChallenge, a book with a constellation on the cover or in the title)
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I found it a surreal experience reading The Prettiest Star after watching the TV series Angels in America which is set in New York during the same era and also deals with a gay man who has AIDS. I thought this was an incredible book. It was sad at times, as Brian returns home to his family, he's dying and wants comfort but is greeted with hostility and prejudice instead because he grew up in small, homophobic town. I was shocked by the reaction of people when they find out he's gay and has AIDS. I cried a lot reading this book but in a good way. This is well worth a read.
