I have a LOT of complicated feelings about this book.

It was marketed to me as an LGBT read which, uh... I guess? Yes, there are a couple confirmed gay characters in it, and there are gay characters with AIDS in it, and AIDS is a major plot point in the book. And like everything else in the universe about AIDS, it made me cry. But it also felt like the use of it as this backdrop piece really created this slippage where it could be used. I did appreciate that the author didn't try to ascribe any 'meaning' to it, though it would be interesting to do a reading of the character of Toby alongside, say, critiques of how PWA were depicted during the mid to late 80s, but it also was left in this amorphous, apolitical space. At one point, June, the narrator, hears Reagan's speech where he breaks the silence on AIDS with the suggestion that people should stop having sex to prevent it, and she literally says something like "I think that's a good idea." And yes, I think we're supposed to attribute that response to her immaturity and her mixed-up feelings about love and romance, but it also gave me this moment of horror because her response went entirely unquestioned. That I find really terrifying, because in my experience, there's a massive memory gap in HIV/AIDS history in people around my age and younger, and I don't need the ~discourse crew~ to get any ideas. And I think the way that sex was just avoided is part of it as well--Toby and Finn (the two gay characters) are painted as these incredibly asexual, borderline saint-like figures who can do nothing wrong. They're probably meant to contrast with the other characters' messy 'regular' lives but it just felt... off and weird to me? It felt icky, I guess is the moral of the story, and I was uncomfortable with it throughout the book. I get that like not everyone was in ACT UP, but there was something about the shift of the pain of dying of AIDS was handed off to the family just rubbed me the wrong way.

All of that being said, this book was incredibly beautifully written, and I had to read the last ~third of the book pretty fast because I had to know what was going to happen to these characters. It's probably a really good book if you, unlike me, have Some Chill, but the things that bugged me bugged me throughout.