I’ll give credit where credit is due- this book is well written. Her writing kept me interested, but the subject matter wasn’t something I wanted to read about. 

This book about surviving the 80s AIDS epidemic and shifts from present day to the past. We follow Fiona in present day as she’s trying to find her daughter and in the 80s chapters we follow Yale, a friend of her brother who died at the beginning. We see Yale work at opening an art exhibit while managing the loss and fear of the time. 

As someone who grew up slightly after the main loss and dealt with decades of queer media focusing on this, I am not the audience for this book. This book is meant for someone who hasn’t seen the movies, watched the documentaries, or read books about it. It’s to expose people about a sad part of our past and offer a glimpse into the ignorance, fear, bigotry and what people did to survive and how they helped those that couldn’t. It’s about how that trauma lingers. 

Her writing is great and I’ll give props to her research. While some scenes felt like a way to show that research rather than tell the story, I think she accomplished the goal of presenting the world. 

I will never read this book again and if it opens people’s eyes to the horrors of that time then the book is a success.