Holding the Hurt: On The Prettiest Star
Sometimes you read a novel that doesn’t just tell a story—it feels like it’s handing you a heart, bruised and beating, and asking you to hold it gently. The Prettiest Star by Carter Sickels is one of those books. It’s tender, devastating, and laced with quiet rage. And it deserves to be talked about more.
A Homecoming Filled With Silence and Stigma
Set in 1986, the story begins with Brian Jackson, a young man returning to his small Ohio hometown after years in New York City. Brian is 24, living with AIDS, and exhausted by the toll of watching his friends die while the world looked away. When he comes back to his conservative family, it's not out of hope—it’s because he has nowhere else to go. What follows is a slow, painful reckoning: with his family, with his town, and with the version of himself he left behind.
Told through alternating perspectives—Brian, his mother Sharon, and his younger sister Jess—The Prettiest Star becomes a chorus of misunderstanding, love, fear, and fragile attempts at connection. There are no grand gestures or miracles here. Just small, human moments—some cruel, some redemptive—that add up to a portrait of a family cracking open under the weight of truth.
Beautifully Written, Brutally Honest
Carter Sickels writes with a kind of stripped-back clarity that lets emotion simmer just beneath the surface.
“We live our lives not realizing which moments are special or which are ordinary – what will we remember, what memories will we try to grab onto, to hold close? All of these moments that make up a life.”
The book is political —by insisting that lives like Brian’s are worthy of tenderness, of space, of being seen.
The Prettiest Star is the kind of book I want to press into people’s hands and say: “Just read it. Trust me.” It’s not an easy read, emotionally, but it’s a necessary one. It honours the lives lost to silence, fear, and indifference—and it does so with grace.
If you’re drawn to stories about identity, family fractures, or what it means to come home to a place that never really saw you, this book will break your heart … because life is too short to read bad books.