Joseph CassaraCritiques

A gangbuster start about life for the GLBTQ community of the 1980’s from a latino perspective with a strong focus on transsexuals. We are thrown a bunch of delectable characters with a minimal plot. This felt like the basis for the Ryan Murphy series “Pose”. The novel includes stuff about “Houses”, sex change surgery, and AIDS. Without a compelling story to drive the narrative forward, the reader gets lost. This debut novel by Joseph Cassara runs out of steam heat at the midway point and never recovers.

Three and a half stars. Before you read this book, I highly recommend watching the glorious documentary "Paris is Burning." The book is based off of it. The book flap lays this out, as well. I'm so glad the author was upfront about it; I gave a well-deserved one-star, one-sentence review to an author who tried to put a little-known movie into novel form and insist it was her own work. The author's choice hit quite a nerve with me as the movie is my favorite. Hers, too, apparently. No one has called her out professionally yet.
Cassara doesn't do that at all. His deep respect for the "Paris is Burning" documentary, the time period, and gravity of what was going on leaps off of every page. I tried to read the book as a novel for the first hundred pages, and it dragged in parts and meandered in others. I realized fifty pages later that this book is a series of interconnected vignettes and was probably just -marketed- as a novel. It's a heavy book, both in weight and content, as it should be. I thought it would frame the AIDS crisis a little differently, but I do mean that in a small way, and I'm being mildly petty. (NOTE 10/22/18: I have no idea what I was referring to.) I'm so glad this book was written and published.

This book started out so well, and then it just...flatlined. The narrative bounced around a bunch of characters and became confusing. Nothing happened, either plot- or character-wise. A story basically retelling the real-life 1980s NYC drag scene should never be described as boring, but that's what happened.

An extravagant look into one particular House from the Harlem Ball Scene of the 1980's, Cassara's debut novel focuses on the royalty that is House Xtravaganza. It was certainly an interesting choice to use names of queer trans ancestors (who can be found in the film Paris is Burning). One review asks if the author is considering paying the House survivors royalties, for the use of their names. A good question, and one I would love an answer to.

My favourite thing about Cassara is the way he writes dialogue. He writes dialogue so, so flawlessly. I can hear their voices, their tone, the back and forth of English and Spanish was just a spectacular combination.

This feels like Ru Paul's Drag Race, except it hasn't been made consumable by white cis hetero audiences. It feels authentic and like a living, breathing thing. Cassara mentions Keith Haring, a famous LGBTQ artist and activist, and I was able to pull up a non-fiction book and find Haring's work right in front of me while I read.

One complaint I read on a review here is that some of the characters are too similar. Maybe they are. Did I really care? Not at all. In fact some of the similarities between the characters helped me to understand that the author really was writing about queer culture.

It took me a long time to read because of how heavy it could be sometimes, so: trigger warnings for ALL the things. Drug use, survival sex, sexual assault, prostitution, child abuse.

I'm trying to articulate how much I love this book but I really am falling short. Cassara took away my words.


I'm still crying from the ending.

I did really like this book a lot. It all felt really authentic. However, it felt a little like tragedy-porn to me. Bad thing after bad thing kept happening. Every character is faced over and over again with death and addiction and pain. You know how a lot of people felt like A Little Life was too much (I wasn't one of them)? I felt like this was too much. Too much pain heaped on to three characters, all undeserving.

Spoilers could be present. I read this book all the way to the end. It was hard in places to care enough. This is not my story, this is a story that was going on while I was doing other things. I have a longstanding issue with this world; I'm spending my life working to break away from femininity and gender norms and I don't feel that drag queen culture is an ally. I don't know how accurately this book portrays the world that existed. Did the police mostly leave them alone because they were all dying anyway? Venus' murder just comes and goes. It is probably accurate that the characters' lives didn't intersection with AIDS politics; I remember drag queens being prominent in Pride but maybe that was later. I agree with the criticisms brought up by other reviewers, but it is worth reading. I wondered about the historical references -- it seemed that Dorian must have been at least partly based on a real person, and I didn't really see the point of bringing in Keith Haring for a paragraph.

Why did you use the lives of people you don't know much about (the author spoke in interviews about not being able to attend any NYC ballroom events or contact any of the loved ones of the people he used as the inspirations for his characters), whose history is badly mis-remembered by most of the LGBT community, and whose experiences are outside of your own? Also, the book towards the end sort of started to center two of the male characters in a way that made me feel like, "wow even in a fictional retelling that tries to bring these women more to life, they're still pushed to the side."

I know I'm a super harsh critic of books, but I just felt like this had some issues with historical details (timeline of certain AIDS crisis events and pop culture references were off are two concrete ones) that made me question whether the author did the research required to write authentically about lives quite different from his own.

I wanted to love it and I did love the characters, but for a novel supposedly about participants in New York's drag ball scene, there was very little mention of or time spent at the actual balls. There were also some mis-used words that took me out of the story for a moment. (Sorry I don't have any examples. I have the choice of either trying to lose myself in the story, or reading with post-its and pen and I choose the former.) There is a lot of good here, but, to me, it felt like it needed more work.

My heart was filled and broken between the covers of this book. Every other metaphor falls short. This amount of depth and electricity comes from a debut author? Joseph Cassara, I will read everything you publish.

I have rarely encountered the pull of a place in a novel. Setting has always been tangential, necessary for plot, but contextually unimportant. When booktalking this title, I've remarked upon being thrust into 1980s New York City, seeing the heat steam off the sidewalk in the summertime, even though it's sweater weather where I live now. I fell hard for Hector, Venus, Juanito, Dorian, Angel, Daniel... I can't say they were my friends; they probably would have next to no patience with me, as an outsider. But none of them would let me go until I had properly mourned for each of them. The world truly is richer for having them in it, and yet, the world has no idea what it has lost.