A review by pnwbibliophile
A Minor Chorus by Billy-Ray Belcourt

reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

This beautifully captured a perspective I’ve never read before—that of a Native queer grad student from a rural Alberta rez seeking to find himself as he writes a novel giving representation to the marginalized communities he’s a part of. He both grapples with a state that’s oppressed his people for centuries as well as where his own identity fits within these communities. The author has a gift with intermixing poignant reflection with literary, even poetic, language. Ocean Vuong is refererenced a couple times and you can see his influence on the author’s own writing style (I love Ocean Vuong so I loved seeing that). Yet Billy-Ray Belcourt has his own unique, distinct, and important voice. More than that, he is an artist. You can see that with his sentence-craft and the wider narrative structure. He brings together stories from people in the unnamed narrator’s life—his cousin, a guy he hooks up with, an auntie, and a brother who’s been imprisoned. These stories both reflect the narrator’s own identity while simultaneously making him sometimes feel estranged from them—giving this uneasy, reflective, melancholic feeling which was captured so well. These disparate stories come together to make up the voices in “A Minor Chorus.” This novel isn’t a “feel good” novel, but it captures the idea of what identity means within these marginalized communities so eloquently. The feeling of being “a part of” and “apart from” the communities you belong to is a piece of queer identity which was portrayed brilliantly here. Can’t wait to read more of his work.