A review by golem
Carved in Bone by Michael Nava

4.75

This book is going to stay with me for a long time. It's wonderful to see Nava, now a splendid mature writer, go back to Henry Rios in the 1980s. It's a painful, moving AIDS novel. It captures something that's very difficult to remember now, which is the precarious hope and joy of fledgling queer communities just before the AIDS crisis. This book brings us back there, and forces us to mourn that time--but in many ways it's also a book about now: our current hope and hopelessness, our current epidemic, the violence that young queer people still face. Nava has a great interview about this in LARB. Painful, hopeful. Must-read.
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