Dear Blair Fell,
I stumbled across this author’s debut audiobook when it was a daily deal at Audible in 2022 (which for some reason feels like last year). The Sign for Home made my Best listens of 2022. (I have a brief review of it at Goodreads, here). So, when I saw there was a new book I had to pick it up.
It’s about as far away from his debut book as it is possible to be. It’s set in 1989 and has paranormal elements. But the writing style was familiar and welcome. I found myself sliding into the book like a hot knife through butter – at least initially. As the book progressed, I had moments of disconnection. It’s true that the writing style always held my interest and there were portions of the story which sang.
Joe Agabian is a 29 year old gay Philly native. It’s 1989, the height of the AIDS crisis and life is difficult. Joe’s boyfriend, Elliott, died of the virus 18 months earlier and he’s still grieving. There’s clearly more to their story than is revealed at the start of the book, but what is consistent is Joe’s deep grief and his fear that his entire life will be defined by AIDS, one way or another.
When Joe meets Ronnie Kaminski, tall, a Fabio-haired, muscle-bound Chippendale-type famous within the city, Ronnie tells Joe he can just tell from looking how old someone is. When he guesses 24, Joe doesn’t have the heart to tell him he’s wrong. Besides, being 24 again is a kind of do-over and it may be just what Joe needs. After their first meeting, they both realised they were not destined to be lovers and instead Ronnie took Joe under his wing to teach him how to be a “good gay”.
Joe seemed to me much younger than his 29 years, lacking in self-awareness and having a more youthful selfishness to him which fit better (but not perfectly) with him identifying for most of the book as 24 and far less when I remembered he was actually nearly 30. Joe felt emotionally stunted for much of the book and I didn’t find a lot in the narrative to support the extent of it.
Ronnie has a grand plan to go out to Fire Island for the summer. He’s going to work at a fancy gay bar and pick up a wealthy daddy to treat him right forever. (Of course, things don’t quite go to plan.) In any event, he invites Joe to go with him.
“Um … you know I don’t know anything about bartending, right?” Joe said.
Ronnie waved his hand. “Nothing to it, especially in a gay bar. You just have to be cute, smile, flirt a little, and slosh some booze into a glass. A beagle could do it if he had thumbs and looked hot in a T-shirt!”
When Joe arrives a few days after Ronnie, he finds that the largesse promised by Ronnie is nonexistent – there’s no job and no place to live. Ronnie is a messy character, at turns rude, selfish, unkind and ungenerous and at others, he’s the best friend Joe could hope for.
Luckily for Joe, he kind of falls into an arrangement where he rents the attic of the home of a couple of “old queens”, Lenny and Howie.
“This is the most comfortable bed I’ve ever been in,” he said. “Thank you so much. You really didn’t need to do all this.”
“Oh, poo!” Howie waved his hand. “We’re gay. We’d redecorate the inside of a milk carton given the chance.”
Howie, Lenny and their friends, Saint D’Norman and “Dory the Boozehound” are part of a coven of disco witches. Their leader, Max, is in hospital in the city sick with AIDS-related illness and whether he can make it to Fire Island during the summer is in doubt. Whether he can make it until the end of the summer is in doubt.
From the start, Howie sees something special in Joe. Every now and then, the coven is called upon to use it’s boogie magic to protect a tortured soul. Usually, that person is 29, not 24 though. And there are other things which are “required” for them to be the “chosen one” but still, for Howie, Joe’s aura is telling him to pay attention.
In addition to a place to live, the coven ends up helping Joe find a job so he can survive for the summer.
Joe works in a rundown bar at Asylum Harbor with a grumpy Irish bear of a bar manager, Vince. And he meets a local ferryman, Fergal (who seems to be a magical being himself). A nice little romance develops between Joe and Fergal but it takes a long time to get started and the sailing is not smooth for the pair.
Fergal laughed. “But I got a little surprise waiting for you over at your house.”
“A surprise? For real?” Joe’s heart did a little flip.
“Yep.” Fergal leaned over the bar until he was touching distance from Joe.
“What is it?” Joe let the tip of his finger touch Fergal’s, eliciting a smile.
“Then it wouldn’t be a surprise.”
Vince groaned like he had stabbed himself with broken glass. “Ah Jaysus feckin’ Christ! Get the hell outta here already! The both of you! Please. Before I have to rip my ears off! Go! Now! Feck off! And use protection!”
AIDS and how the gay community was being treated, how they were involved in self-advocacy, how their community was dying in droves, the juxtaposition between a kind of desperate denial over the summer and the in-your-faceness of it all as Joe watches bar customers sicken and disappear over the summer, pervades the book.
How did Howie and Lenny do it? The vast majority of their friends still living either had AIDS or were HIV positive. Howie had told him that he and Lenny had lost eighty-two of their closest friends to the disease so far. How do they breathe without crying?
From reading the acknowledgements at the end, it seems there is at least a part of the story which is semi-autobiographical and I have a feeling it is that part of the story which resonated more strongly with me.
I was a little jarred by the disco witches – their manifesto and methodology was very camp and fun but what was behind it was very serious indeed. It sometimes gave me a little emotional whiplash.
While “boogying,” they chanted the sacred questions together: Knuf annaw uoy OD? Em htiw Knuf annaw uoy OD?
(Hint, read the chant backwards.)
I suspect that the whole witchiness of the book made the dire situation of the gay community due to AIDS a little less heartbreaking to read about but it was still desperately sad. There are references to the Gay Mens Health Crisis and famous activists, familiar to me from The Normal Heart and And the Band Played On, both of which document AIDS in the 1980s in different ways. (Fantastic books but enraging, heartbreaking, terrifying at the same time as being uplifting and motivating.) Notwithstanding the paranormal elements, the story is firmly grounded in history.
Overall, the book was a bit of a mixed bag, with parts a bit too kitsch for me and the story a little meandering and others touching, or funny, insightful (or a mix of all three). There was a large cast of characters and many subplots. At times I wasn’t sure exactly what the book was going for. Then again, I’m a straight, Australian, cis woman so…
Grade: B
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Kaetrin
Kaetrin started reading romance as a teen and then took a long break, detouring into fantasy and thrillers. She returned to romance in 2008 and has been blogging since 2010. She reads contemporary, historical, a little paranormal, urban fantasy and romantic suspense, as well as erotic romance and more recently, new adult. She loves angsty books, funny books, long books and short books. The only thing mandatory is the HEA. Favourite authors include Mary Balogh, Susanna Kearsley, Joanna Bourne, Tammara Webber, Kristen Ashley, Shannon Stacey, Sarah Mayberry, JD Robb/Nora Roberts, KA Mitchell, Marie Sexton, Patricia Briggs, Ilona Andrews, just to name a few. You can find her on Twitter: @kaetrin67.
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