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Carter Sickles’ The Prettiest Star
Reviewing a would-be classic
It’s the summer of 1986, and Brian Jackson has returned to his tiny Ohio hometown to die. Perhaps he hasn’t quite accepted in those first days of being back home that his end is coming soon, but he knows, and we know, and the rest of Carter Sickles’ 2020 novel The Prettiest Star (Hub City Press) takes us inside his knowing, his reflections, via an ongoing journal, and his ongoing video montage of those last months.
Brian has already survived his lover, Sean. Now, what love is left to/for him?
We also go deep into two other character’s attempts to cope with what they know; what they’ve done and haven’t done to show Brian that they still love him. His mother Sharon wants to touch her first-born child, but this isn’t easy given Brian’s anger, his extremely sick body, and the reality that in this small town in 1986, what we know and accepted about AIDS could have been written on any tiny star, if you could find one, that is.
And his sister Jess, who was only eight when Brian left to find love and work and a life in New York: now she’s an adolescent, and if you know that age, that life in a small or mid-sized high school, you’ll quickly remember/understand the grief she takes from all the “in” kids who relish pouncing on the misfit girl whose brother has “the…