The Great Believers

One sentence synopsis... Told in alternating chapters, between a group of gay men in Chicago in the 1980s and a mother searching for her daughter in Paris in 2015, this books tells the story of the AIDS epidemic from the initial outbreak to present day. .

Read it if you liked... ‘The Normal Heart', ‘Dallas Buyers Club', or other thoughtful and heartbreaking chronicles of the AIDS crisis. Also, the series ‘Looking' for the complicated male friendships. .

Dream casting... Kate Hudson as the flighty but loyal mother Fiona. Jonathan Groff as Yale. Also, this would need to be a miniseries instead of a movie. Production companies take note. To make this layered, decade-crossing story a 2hr movie would be to rob it of so much depth.

Wow. Just wow. This book is so marvelously sad. Tragically, beautifully, wonderfully sad. It's that perfect confluence of art, emotion, and entertainment and I absolutely loved it.

I'm finding these days the mark of a good book means a few things for me: 1) I can't put it down, and when I have to, I spend a good portion of the day looking forward to getting back to it. 2) some sentences make me pause and reread to reflect on some sentiment that seems so absolutely true to me, yet so nuanced that I'm almost surprised someone else felt the same 3) I'm completely immersed in a different perspective and a different time — so much so that I feel, viscerally, the pains of that perspective/time... and get so engrossed that I find myself googling, say, “1980s AIDS crisis Chicago” because I need to know everything.

And this book did those things. It sounds corny but reading it, I felt among a group of friends. And the plot is consuming, besides. Great read!