Lone Stars
A Novel
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4.1 • 9 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
"Desperately affecting." —The New York Times
“Generous and epic…takes us through generations of a singular family, whose loves and losses also tell us a story about America itself." —Eliot Schrefer, National Book Award finalist, author of Endangered
Justin Deabler's Lone Stars follows the arc of four generations of a Texan family in a changing America. Julian Warner, a father at last, wrestles with a question his husband posed: what will you tell our son about the people you came from, now that they're gone? Finding the answers takes Julian back in time to Eisenhower's immigration border raids, an epistolary love affair during the Vietnam War, crumbling marriages, queer migrations to Cambridge and New York, up to the disorienting polarization of Obama's second term. And in these answers lies a hope: that by uncloseting ourselves—as immigrants, smart women, gay people—we find power in empathy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Deabler's bighearted debut, a gay man looks back on his family's history to understand how his heritage and identity are woven by his home state of Texas. Julian Warner begins his story with Eisenhower's anti-immigration border raids in the 1950s, as seen through the eyes of his mother, impressionable, young Lacy Adams. In 1969 Lacy meets Aaron Warner, a soldier serving in Vietnam, whom she later marries. They have a son, the precocious Julian, and Aaron, unable to keep a job for more than six months at a time, takes a succession of lovers. Julian comes out to Lacy after a gay high school classmate is assaulted, motivating Lacy to become a gay rights activist. Julian goes off to Harvard and later moves to Brooklyn, embarking on a legal career and a marriage, before a final reckoning with his Texas roots involves surprises from both his parents' sides of the family. Deabler's layered if at times chockablock story of gay rights, immigrants' rights, and the financial crisis of 2008 Julian's husband quits his finance job over a crisis of conscience makes good use of the general messiness of family ties and the longing to extend one's line into an uncertain future. In the end, this novel proudly and emotionally defines what it means to be from the Lone Star State.
