Hey Everyone,
As you know, I’ve been trying a new thing for me, where I share a book I love and provide a free ebook link to it, if possible.
Okay, even if I haven’t managed to complete all the prompts of the readathons this month, they did take me to places that I wouldn’t have found otherwise, including the channel of Georgia MaREADS. She reads pretty much solely from the LGBTI+ genre. She created a video where she asked Reddit for LGBTI+ recommendations, and she picked three, among which was “My Government Means to Kill Me” by Rasheed Newson. As soon as she finished the review, I knew I had to read it.
It’s so good that you will think that you’re reading Trey (the main character) when in reality, he’s a fictional character. It’s set in the 80s during the AIDS epidemic, which is true, as it affected gay guys, but as we can see in this book and others, this horrible virus made the LGBTI+ community come together since they only had each other. The author incorporates real-life events and people who lived during that era, fighting for the rights of all. The book comes with footnotes that describe the event or who the person was.
First Lines:
It is true that before moving to New York City in May of 1985, I turned my back on a six-figure trust fund. I was seventeen, and I wanted to be able to lay sole claim to my successes and failures. My parents considered me foolish, stubborn, and, worse yet, ungrateful. “You’ll regret it,” my mother told me. Yet I didn’t miss the money— at first.
Goodreads Blurb:
orn into a wealthy Black Indianapolis family, Earl “Trey” Singleton III leaves his overbearing parents and their expectations behind by running away to New York City with only a few dollars in his pocket. In the city, Trey meets up with a cast of characters that changes his life forever. He volunteers at a renegade home hospice for AIDS patients, and after being put to the test by gay rights activists, becomes a member of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). Along the way Trey attempts to navigate past traumas and searches for ways to maintain familial relationships—all while seeking the meaning of life amid so much death.
Vibrant, humorous, and fraught with entanglements, Rasheed Newson’s My Government Means to Kill Me is an exhilarating, fast-paced coming-of-age story that lends itself to a larger discussion about what it means for a young gay Black man in the mid-1980s to come to terms with his role in the midst of a political and social reckoning.
Download Link Here
Goodreads Link Here
Alex
Mybookworld24 