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    The Prettiest Star
    The Prettiest Star
    The Prettiest Star
    Audiobook10 hours

    The Prettiest Star

    Written by Carter Sickels

    Narrated by Charlie Thurston and Tiffany Morgan

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    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.

    Contains mature themes.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMay 19, 2020
    ISBN9781705205181
    Author

    Carter Sickels

    Carter Sickels, a graduate of the MFA program at Pennsylvania State University, was awarded fellowships to Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and the MacDowell Colony. After living for a decade in New York City, Sickels left to earn a master's degree in folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He now lives in Portland, Oregon.

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    Reviews for The Prettiest Star

    4.5/5

    61 ratings3 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Subjects like this can go two ways - the ending is a Hallmark movie where everyone is in love - or reality. This was the gritty reality of a gay man with AIDS going home to die. There are a few main characters and the complexities of their feelings and the reality of the time is interesting. I think it must be a pretty accurate account that some experienced in the 1980s
    • 5/5
      Cryed my way through this, but it was worth it. I remember the 80s and AIDs in the news. The split between the person you are to your gay family and how much you can be yourself with your birth family is strongly expressed.
    • 5/5
      i have no words and tears left this book is heartbreaking jesus christ