The House of Impossible Beauties

Oh, how I wanted to love this.

The plot and pacing were spotty, and the book lost its way as it went on. The ball scene plays a decreasingly small part in the book as it progresses, instead replaced by a series of gratuitously bleak plot points, which lack the intended impact. This is heightened by the fact that the foreshadowing of some of these scenes is so stunted they feel feigned.

Borrowing heavily from ‘Paris is Burning', sometimes interpolating real-life characters from the time, I didn't feel this brought anything new to the subject. Especially when you have TV shows like ‘Pose' which are managing to capture the stark disparity between the glitz of the NYC ball scene and the devastation of the AIDS crisis in a more believable way.

I don't regret spending my time reading it, but I do feel this book was a bit of a missed opportunity.