The Prettiest Star by Carter Sickels

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Just a few years beyond the setting of THE PRETTIEST STAR by Carter Sickles, sometime during the mid-‘90s in western North Carolina, which is a few miles south of THE PRETTIEST STAR’s Chester, Ohio, my wife had a good friend whose son was in a hospital dying of AIDS. Leesa went to visit him, taking our younger son with her. In the hospital room, while Leesa visited with her friends, Raleigh climbed up on the bed and sat feeding Allen one round Cheerio at a time.

Reading THE PRETTIEST STAR, I was reminded of those panicky days in the ‘80s and ‘90s that come to life so vividly in Sickles’s novel. The horrors of Chester were all around us throughout those days—whether the product of an ignorance weaponized by the fear at the root of hate or by simple, thoughtless ignorance alone. The Chester recreation folks drain the public swimming pool after the sick man, Brian, enjoys a momentary, ecstatic float on a hot day. His grandmother is kicked out of the town’s only sit-down restaurant for bringing Brian along for a meal. A passerby throws a soft drink in his face from the window of a pickup truck. Anonymous people call Brian’s home and whisper hate speech—the period’s version of hateful social media posts. The church joins in the fearful persecution, of course, smiling benevolently all the while. The universe of family, from the satellite cousins to the near moon of a father, fall away into the dark distance. Hospital staff won’t touch him.

In the midst of this, especially the abandonment by the caregivers (so different from many caregivers in the current COVID-19 devastation), I remembered Raleigh and Allen and the Cheerios. I’d always thought that a sweet story, but while on my deep dive into the world Sickles revives I suddenly realized that this simple gesture of a child must have shaken the world of Allen’s hospital room. I imagine Allen in Brian and his mother Suzy in Brian’s mother Sharon, and I begin to understand that such a kindness was beyond sweet. Far beyond sweet.

I mentioned this to Leesa after I’d finished reading THE PRETTIEST STAR, and she reminded me of a young nurse that day, who pulled her aside as Raleigh sat picking out one Cheerio at a time and said that she’d been afraid to go near Allen—afraid to treat him as a patient, afraid to treat him as a fellow, suffering human being. After seeing a child’s innocent act of feeding the sick and hungry, she said, she would no longer be afraid. I hope she followed through with that. I want to believe that she did.

This is what great and simple acts do to and for us. And this is how great stories powerfully told, stories like THE PRETTIEST STAR, connect us to our humanity and that of all—all—around us.



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