It's still one of the highlights of my life hearing RuPaul praise my blog on his podcast. RuPaul's Drag Race has found a global audience in recent years and I've been a huge follower of it since the third season. Many thanks to Oneworld publications for an ARC. A wonderfully ambitious book that evokes an era, a place, a community and its history. This is a novel that is destined to leave a trail of tears and heartbreak in its wake.

I loved the humanity and courage portrayed in a lyrical narrative bursting with fizz and life affirming energy. You cannot help falling for this cast of characters and their unflinching determination to be there for each other against all that the world throws at them.

Angel brings in Venus who searches for the rich man to protect and look after her, the introvert transgender Juanita who obsesses over design and fabrics and Daniel. Tragedy beckons as Hector faces serious health issues. With this in mind, Angel and Hector set up the first ever latino House of Xtravanganza within the Harlem Ball circle. She meets and falls for Hector, a professional dancer, but yearns to create a form of family and home for others, who like her, now have none that they can fall back on. She is transfixed by the glamour and vitality of the drag scene, and hones in on the legendary drag queen, Dorian. It does not shirk from the grittiness of life as a sex worker, the perils of addiction and in its depiction of the never ending abuse.ġ7 year old Angel, has been traumatised by the way her family has treated her. The character driven story unfolds with verve, humour, wit, anger, and colour as it follows its inevitable trajectory with the complications of life in this era in LGBT New York.

Set in New York, it tells of young gay and transgender characters, facing the trauma and rejection of their actual families and their efforts to set up their own chosen close knit and supportive 'family' circle that faces up to the challenges of identity, murder, abuse, brutality, the horrors of the Aids crisis, hatred, prejudice and tragedy. Joseph Cassara has written a heart wrenching paean to the LGBT community, a blend of fact and fiction based on the critically acclaimed documentary on the House of Xtravaganza in the 1980s and 1990, Paris Is Burning.

The house of impossible beauties review