Review by Booklist Review
This book-length essay is a triumph of loving erudition and studied panache conveying Als' passion for the mercurial musical powerhouse who was known as Prince. Having fallen in love with the Purple Rain Prince early on, Als both focuses on the artist and offers a unique and needed perspective on the gay Black experience. Though this fascinating, quick read doesn't attempt to speak for the entire queer community, it does shed light on one truth, that love is love and it's often complicated. From early fandom in concert halls to green-room interviews as a journalist, Als got up close to Prince, so much so that Prince proposed a book collaboration. Als declined, but muses on more intimate possibilities. "Was my dream to be his girlfriend, his Dorothy Parker, a dream, or an appropriate response to love, pure and not so simple?" Therein is the rub of this shining little book: love, desire, longing, dreams, and truths. A journey well worth taking, this distinctive, poised, compact book is an education and more. It is a gem.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Pulitzer winner Als (White Girls) brings serpentine prose and acerbic wit to this slim, two-part take on Prince, desire, and loss. Als fashions Prince as the avatar of his own lovers, as well as Als's many changing selves ("I saw his difference. It was like yours, Prince. Was I in love with him or with you when I met you backstage in St. Louis or saw you in Texas?"), and these strands of sexuality mingle with confusion and injustices, among them Prince and other Black artists' forfeiture of their own work to their record labels. Meanwhile, Als examines how poet and cultural critic Dorothy Parker haunted Prince as the subject of his 1987 song, and by extension Als as he tries to understand Parker's role in Prince's life and his own; she could be the lover that they both seek, or the self that they portray to others. Als also recounts watching Prince pander to white audiences and producers and then return to a more recognizable version of himself with his 2004 album Musicology. Don't be fooled by the page count, Als conjures entire worlds between these covers. Readers are sure to find pleasure and pain in this bite-size delight. (Nov.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A tale of a brief encounter and long obsession with the late musical icon Prince. Prince (1958-2016) contained multitudes, and every book about him seems to explore his aura through a different filter--musical, sexual, sartorial, religious, and so on. In this slim book, first published as an essay under a different title in Harper's in 2012, Pulitzer Prize--winning cultural critic Als emphasizes Prince's role as a queer Black icon, somebody who challenged the notion that "for sex to be sex it needs to be shaming." Prince's 1988 album Lovesexy wasn't his most successful, but for Als, it represents the high point of Prince's sexual fluidity, his "DJ-like mixing of homosexualist and heterosexualist impulses." The author reads Prince's defiance toward the mainstream record industry in the 1990s as symbolic of his effort to challenge the supremacy of heteronormative, White behavior. But Prince is still a slippery persona for Als: He writes about interviewing him backstage before a 2004 concert and being simultaneously charmed by him (his face "had the exact shape, and large eyes, of a beautiful turtle") and put off, as when he evangelized on his faith as a Jehovah's Witness. Prince at once lamented male journalists who feared their femininity while projecting a "new, heterosexualized, Jesus-loving self." At fewer than 50 pages, this book is too short to address Prince's protean nature in depth. But as an appreciation of the liberating power he had over Als as a gay Black man, it's undeniably engrossing. (Straight men felt that power, too: The book opens with a Jamie Foxx stand-up routine about having his hetero identity rocked by Prince.) In that regard, it's a story about love in general, delighting in seeing yourself in a star, and lamenting when that star flickers in a different way. A lyrical, provocative take on pop music's power. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
