Review Detail

Sully can’t wait to get out of Hearst, Pennsylvania, and go off to their fashion internship in the big city. In preparation for this, Sully sells their car to Brad, whom they find extremely boring, yet he might be the only other gay kid in their town. Unfortunately for Sully, their internship doesn’t work out as planned, and they have to stay in Hearst with no money, no job, and no car. They visit their favorite place, the thrift store, where they find a vintage bag that they plan to resell. Things take a turn when Sully begins investigating this bag and finds that it is haunted, with the ghost of Rufus. Rufus is a drag performer who has no memory of how he died. Sully now has a different plan for his summer; he wants to help Rufus unlock his past so that he can move on and then profit from the bag.

What I Liked: This book does a great job at setting the scene for you and putting you inside Hearst, along with Sully’s impression of everything going on. There are pieces of the book in which you are hearing from Rufus’s past partner to piece his history together, and these moments switch to a more serious tone as we learn about the discrimination that took place against queer people in Rufus’s time. It’s heartbreaking as Rufus’s past gets pieced together and you find out exactly what happened to him, and how the past continues to impact the present time for queer people. While these are heartbreaking moments, they are also moments of hope, as we discover the resilience of queer people and realize that we aren’t going anywhere.

The authors do a great job of combining humor with heartfelt moments so that the book flows nicely. The two stories, Sully and Rufus’s stories, are intertwined throughout this book and do a great job of mirroring one another as we see their resilience and what queer life looks like now in a small town and also in the past. It was fascinating to learn history throughout this book in a way that a teenage audience would find compelling due to the tie with the present.

Final Verdict: Let Them Stare is a delightful story about friendship, belonging, and community while being queer in a small town, and queer history. This book is perfect for fans of Jonathan Van Ness and Julie Murphy. The book has a perfect amount of supernatural, magic, and romance sprinkled throughout each page.