Sprinkle says this book is a call to action, and especially a call for community unification, but I'm not sure this is exactly how he wants it to be done, nor does it necessarily address the same questions that a lot of queer community folks have been grappling with for a while now.

I want to say right here that this book is extremely graphic. There are descriptions of the hate crimes (all of which are murders, in this case; Sprinkle makes no claims as to why he chooses to focus on that, except probably because they have the most rhetorical power? which is a whole other thing,) and those descriptions can be incredibly, incredibly graphic; I was definitely triggered while reading the book more than once. Please, if you feel compelled to read this, take care of yourself while you do so.

There are also few questions about what it means to address these crimes in a larger sense. In the wake of Tyler Clementi's death, there was a lot of grappling with what it meant to think about imprisonment, framing certain actors in certain ways, and calls for death sentences. Sprinkle is not interested in those questions at all--perhaps this reflects the requests/wishes/desires of the surviving family members, who I will say he does due diligence by. He is careful and tender in his reporting of familial (biological or otherwise) relationships. But for a book making a political claim, and which is attentive to differences in race, gender, and class of victims, it is not attentive to larger questions about imprisonment. At times, it comes across as somewhat bloodthirsty, which is an odd take.

If I were to teach this (which I wouldn't,) I would pair it with Sarah Lamble's piece on Transgender Day of Remembrance. It does good journalistic work of structuring these people's lives, but there's very little heavy lifting and the parts where he justifies his reenactment of violence fall flat for me.