Winner of the 2021 Ohioana Book Award in Fiction
Winner of the 2021 Southern Book Prize
Winner of the 2021 Weatherford Award for Best Appalachian Book
“This novel deserves a place in the canon of AIDS literature alongside the likes of Larry Kramer and, more recently, Rebecca Makkai.” —The Los Angeles Review of Books
“Powerfully affecting and disturbing."—Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
“A brutally fresh kind of homecoming novel.” — Entertainment Weekly
“Sickels’ second novel, about a young, gay man dying from AIDS in 1986, is one of the most heart-wrenching novels I’ve read in a long time.” —The San Francisco Chronicle
O, Oprah Magazine’s “31 LGBTQ Books That'll Change the Literary Landscape in 2020"
Entertainment Weekly names The Prettiest Star one of 50 most anticipated books of 2020 and a must-read!
IndieNextPick from ABA!
BookRiot’s “Most Anticipated LGBTQ Books of 2020”
Atlanta Journal Constitution’s “10 Southern Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2020”
Bitch Media, “27 Novels Feminists Should Read in 2020”
Ms. Magazine, “Reads for the Rest of Us: Feminist Books Out in 2020”
The Prettiest Star published by Hub City Press, 2020.
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“With this novel, Sickels has offered readers the queer homecoming we never had — homecoming as arrival rather than return.” —The Los Angeles Review of Books
"Sickels' characters are painfully flawed and wholly, believably human in their failings. This unflinching honesty, conveyed in finely crafted prose, makes for a memorable and unsettling novel. Powerfully affecting and disturbing."—Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
"From its opening sentences Carter Sickels’ The Prettiest Star makes it clear that too many queer narratives have been kept out of sight. Here a man returns to the town of his southern Ohio childhood at a point when his own day-to-day survival is at stake. Love doesn’t come in to save him, or the family and friends upended by his presence. “Nothing transforms, there is no magic,” says one character, and while there’s darkness in those words, their down to earth candor does a lot to convey why this novel feels so touching, affecting, rebellious, and real." —Paul Lisicky, author of LATER
"This tragic story of AIDS and violent homophobia stands out by showing the transcendent power of queer communities to make their voices endure through art."—Publishers Weekly
"Get ready for your heart to explode into an entire cosmos. Carter Sickels' The Prettiest Star is the story of a young man who must drag his body from the mouth of death back to the "home" that nearly killed him. The story of a queer desiring body moving through the crucibles of life toward song, toward rewriting family and whatever we mean by home, toward a kind of hope that comes from the dirt up and not the sky down. A heart triumph." —Lidia Yuknavitch, author Verge and The Chronology of Water
“A brutally fresh kind of homecoming novel.” (A-) — Entertainment Weekly
"As small-town news travels, Brian is vilified, accused of trying to spread AIDS, refused dentist and doctor visits, and shunned, and it tears apart his once close-knit family. The alternating narrators of Brian, Sharon, and Jess are fleshed out in all of their complexities and contradictions. This immersive, tragic book will stay with readers."—Booklist
To read “The Prettiest Star” during a pandemic, when death, illness, fear and misinformation abound, when mask-wearing becomes a political issue rather than a public health no-brainer, is to realize how far we’ve come since the AIDS crisis, and how far we still have to go.
—The Post and Courier
The terrible abandonment of gay people and people with AIDS and the consequences of this on our collective emotional lives and relationships is the story that we need in order to understand who we really are. All of us. I am so grateful to Carter Sickels and Hub City Press for giving us the gift of The Prettiest Star.
—Sarah Schulman, author of People In Trouble
The Prettiest Star is a lyrical and compulsively readable novel about the intricate, tangled bonds of family and the way human beings can be both profoundly cruel and surprisingly wonderful. These characters are people we know, and they'll stay with me for a very long time. This deeply moving novel is much more than the story of one family dealing with the worst tragedy of their lives in a small Ohio town in 1986. It's actually the story of all of us--the story of America, then and now, how far we've come, and how far we still have to go.
—Silas House, author of Southernmost
"Amid the tragedy, threads of loyalty, strength, and pride result in a glimmer of hope—not for a happy ending, but for human beings’ capacity to love one another through the worst crises. Devastating and impactful, The Prettiest Star captures the profound effects of the AIDS crisis, and the lies and bigotry that contributed to it." —Foreword Reviews
With the most inviting prose imaginable, Carter Sickels has written a beautiful, heartstrung-tugging story about a young man searching for peace, and the family that loves him through thick and thin.The Prettiest Star is a novel I'll never forget.
—De'Shawn Charles Winslow, author of In West Mills
“The Prettiest Star pays homage to the victims of that horrible time and offers a measure of solace to the survivors.” — Chapter 16
"I read Carter Sickels' The Prettiest Star very slowly, in part because I needed to savor the precious realism of the characters who felt like home to me, and in part because this beautiful gut punch of a novel kept taking my breath away. This is a novel about queerness, about AIDS, about the South, but mostly it is about the right of return, the right to bloom where you are planted and be buried in the soil that birthed you, no matter how queer you may be, no matter how long you've been gone. The characters are so thoughtfully drawn that even in their most selfish moments, I could not help but love them, root for them as individuals and as a family unit. I know these people, from their Aqua Net hairspray and secret cigarettes to their casseroles and cookouts. In rendering their particularities so tenderly Sickles' reminds us that if broken hearts are born out of the intimacy of belonging, sometimes they are healed by small intimacies too.”
—E.R. Anderson, Charis Books, Atlanta, GA
“The Prettiest Star was written with great depth and emotion.” —Atlanta Journal-Constitution