The Prettiest Star, Carter Sickels
The Prettiest Star, Carter Sickels
List: $24.99 | Sale: $17.50
Club: $12.49

The Prettiest Star

Author: Carter Sickels

Narrator: Charlie Thurston, Tiffany Morgan

Unabridged: 10 hr 21 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 05/19/2020

Categories: Fiction, Lgbtq+


Synopsis

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.

About Carter Sickels

Carter Sickels is the author of the novel The Evening Hour. He is the recipient of the 2013 Lambda Literary Emerging Writer Award, and has been awarded scholarships to Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, VCCA, and the MacDowell Colony. His essays and fiction have appeared in various publications, including Guernica, Bellevue Literary Review, and BuzzFeed, and he is the editor of Untangling the Knot: Queer Voices on Marriage, Relationships & Identity. Carter is assistant professor of English at Eastern Kentucky University, where he teaches in the Bluegrass Writers Studio low-residency MFA program.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Melissa (Always Behind) on December 21, 2022

This book is so utterly heartbreaking. So many tears shed during the reading. Book club read for December. Set in rural Ohio in 1986, when Brian returns home from his life in New York to die. He has AIDS. Brian left home six years before, shunning the stifling small town for the freedom of the city.......more

Goodreads review by Frank on October 31, 2020

Wow...what an emotional, raw, riveting read this was. Words cannot explain the emotions I went through while reading this novel. It was powerful and hit me hard on account of how realistic the situations and characters were. This is one of my favorites of 2020, thus far.......more