A review by yanailedit
The House of Impossible Beauties by Joseph Cassara

4.0

Cassara is a skilled story-teller who brings a profoundly compassionate perspective to a dark part of queer history. It rises above all the tidy sensationalization and glamorization to punch you right in the heart with a fine-tuned balance of tragedy and the small moments that make life worth it...

It'll make you think long and hard about the weight of social rejection.

Highly recommended.

PS: One of the reviewers I saw before deciding to read this book called Cassara's use of 'randomly thrown in Spanish words' (rough paraphrasing) clumsy. Nothing could be further from the truth; the author does a fantastic job of representing vernacular voices without which the book would be every bit as sterile as mainstream accounts of queer culture tend to be.