I think my heart is a little bit broken. The House of Impossible Beauties centres on the trans community in New York during the 1970s onwards. It looks at the lack of understanding outside of the LGBTQIA+ community. It navigates familial breakdown and looks at how a person can create their own family - they may not be blood but it shows that you don’t need to be related by arbitrary blood types to look out for one another.

The House of Impossible Beauties couldn’t exist in this time period without looking at the AIDS crisis. The story shows how it ravaged those who were infected and how the negativity surrounding sexuality was juxtaposed to the narrative of the day.

Mainly it looks at loss. That comes in the form of loss of innocence but mainly through the loss of those that you love. The House of Impossible Beauties was in fact a beautiful, heartbreaking story.

The House of Impossible Beauties by Joseph Cassara is available now.

For more information regarding Joseph Cassara (@josephbcassara) please visit www.josephcassara.com.

For more information regarding Oneworld Publications (@OneworldNews) please visit www.oneworld-publications.com.

This book was an interesting one. It's based on the trans and queer world of 1980s New York city. I previously had not heard anything about the drag ball scene and I really enjoyed reading about it here. I watched Paris is Burning just to get get a deeper understanding of the culture. It is truly fascinating. Those involved in this scene and those who featured in this novel came from such a diverse array of backgrounds and each struggled to make their way in life. The House of Xtravaganza is the house on which many of the characters of this novel were based. It's one of the most famous houses of that era. So much that went on during that era was secret, hidden, unspoken- and had to be so due to society's restrictive parameters. This book delves deep into their secrets and really informs us of how they struggled to survive. It gives fantastic insight into a previously uncovered world.

A stunning picture of all that glittered in New York in the 1980s. Anyone who wishes to learn more about LGBTQ+ lives will find themselves fully immersed; fans of Pose know what to expect. Parts of this book are written in Spanish, so if you're monolingual (like me!) I recommend reading on Kindle or any platform that allows you to highlight and define words.

I adored this heart warming, heart breaking fictionalised account of the House of Xtravaganza. It brims with wit, sass and emotion, bringing every character vividly to life and exploring the highs and lows of their existence. Highly recommended

The House of Impossible Beauties is the debut novel of Joseph Cassara, exploring the LGBT and ballroom scene in Harlem during the late 1970s to the early 1990s. Fans of RuPaul’s Drag Race and Paris Is Burning may be familiar with the infamous House of Xtravaganza – this novel imagines the lives of the real life members as they navigate life facing poverty, abandonment, racism, rampant homophobia and the aids crisis. It’s incredibly tragic, heartwarming and serves all kind of sass!

Cassara’s debut novel follows the fictionalised accounts of several members of the House ofXtravaganza and does so with ease. As the characters stories intertwine and diverge, the plot flows seamlessly and can be followed with ease. Cassara has managed to encapsulate the zeitgeist of not only an era but of a subculture.

“I will tell her to look at my face – no, lines, no wrinkles, no bags. She can stare at my youth – and suffer.” Now this is the level of sass I aspire to live by.

As far as I am concerned this is my favorite book of 2018. It was so raw, so emotional, so absolutely beautiful. I would read it over and over again if I'd have the time. Highly recommended!

This whole novel felt as if it existed on the surface–a shiny veneer with nothing underneath. Or, rather, underneath was the true story, the real lives of countless trans, gay and lesbian warriors, mostly poor, mostly people of colour, many of them working the streets, many of them homeless. But the truth and depth of those stories did not come across in these pages.

The novel is based on the real House of Xtravaganza, one of the more famous houses of ballroom culture, founded in 1982 by Hector Xtravaganza. Many of the characters in this novel (including Hector and the house mother, Angel) are based on real people who part of the all-Latino House of Xtravaganza. With this premise, it would be expected that this story would be honestly heartfelt, yet the author overdoes the prose, ruining the reality of this important part of LGBTQ history.

The characters, for me, fell flat. I finished the book with a sense that I never really got to know them. They were not drawn as whole people with deeply unique stories, histories, desires, fears, and joys. Perhaps Cassara would have been better served using entirely fictional characters, rather than trying to base his story on real people. Because the characters felt so far away, the emotional impact of the book was not personal. I did not feel it in my gut.

In this beautiful, moving book, Joseph Cassara paints a fictionalised account of the House of Xtravanganza, the first all-Latinx house on the Harlem ball circuit Without doing more reading, it's impossible to tell what is fact and what is fiction, but it's certainly piqued my interest and I'm interested to watch Paris is Burning, the documentary that first introduced these figures to the world. We follow along as Angel, Venus, Juanito and Daniel battle with their pasts and come together to form a house (and more than that, a family) in the face of adversity - bound by their situation but also by their love of the drag scene.

At times it's fun and bright and joyful, and at times it's sad and moving and beautiful. But I guess, that's what life is like, and even more so for the LGBTQ+ community in New York in the 1980s. The threat of AIDS and the people they've lost haunt the book and the characters, and I was moved to tears on more than one occasion.

There's little plot, and as a result I found myself lapsing in focus, often putting this book down and not returning for a few days or a week. But, I always returned, drawn by the vivid characters and the gorgeous writing. This book feels like a love letter to the characters, and, although Angel and Venus are definitely the stars that burn brightest, you almost feel enveloped in their little family as you watch them navigate the drag world, their own gender expression, sex work and addiction. At times Cassara is scathing and witty, but he's always tender and caring, and it makes for a really lovely reading experience.

Cassara has managed to capture a snapshot of hedonistic 80s culture, richly steeped in beautiful creatures and intricate backstories that interweave to create a wonderful story about an underground community that many of us knew nothing, and still know, little about. The characters have been carefully crafted with obvious love and attention to detail in order to recreate a tale full of wit and sadness in equal measure.

The story is told almost in a memoir style, made up of anecdotal stories centering around several key characters and their dalliances in the club underground scene while the threat of AIDs hangs over them. Characters include larger than life Venus and ultimate diva Angel. In fact, these two stand out as my favourite characters, bringing a lot of colour and life to the page in whatever scenes they appear. I found myself itching to get back to their tales over the others.

It’s a book jam packed with stories, information and history and at times it seems like there’s almost too much crammed into the pages. This was sometimes to the detriment of the characters, as certain moments are passed over in favour of others and some things weren’t really developed to a great depth. I loved that the author mixed fact and fiction, but sometimes I felt it was almost trying too hard and trying to cover too much ground. I would have much preferred a story, or stories, centred around Venus and Angel and the rest as secondary characters.

That said, I really enjoyed this. It’s gritty and real and never shys away from showing the hardships that the LGBT community have been through.

I studied film theory at university, primarily focussing on queer and gender theory, so suffice to say I saw Paris Is Burning many, many times. If you haven’t seen this ground-breaking (and quite controversial) documentary from the early 90s (it captured New York’s ball scene in the 80s scene, which Madonna s̶t̶o̶l̶e̶ ̶f̶r̶o̶m̶ paid homage to with Vogue) then you definitely should watch it first. This novel is loosely based on one of the most iconic drag “houses” from the scene: the House of Xtravaganza. Virgin and Angie (called Angel in the book) are two of the most iconic people to appear in the documentary and it’s interesting to imagine their lives against the backdrop of 70s and 80s New York. The ball scene barely features in the novel but it hums in the background of their lives. Sadly, even if you haven’t seen the documentary it’s not hard to predict how the story ends – but I was still in tears throughout the last couple of chapters (I don’t think anyone under 45 can even begin to imagine what it was like to live through the first decade of AIDS). I found the structure of the book made it a little hard to get into the story at times (it’s no surprise that it started out as a short story) but I think it’s still an interesting read for fans of queer history.

Archived before I could could download it so can’t review

The ambient and zest of the story makes this one! The descriptions and narrator are appalling, even if I suppose I got slowed up in the reading. Very impressive!

Unlike many other reviewers, i haven't yet seen paris is burning and the 'house' scene was unfamilar to me.
However, this was a moving book that really appealed to me, with compelling characters. It was particulary sad. I will however echo other reviewers who found some of the spanish and slang a little jarring.

If you have ever watched 'Paris is Burning' (and if not, you really should) and wanted to get more of a backstory of the characters featured in it, this is a must read. This is a part-fictional, part-factual retelling of the House of Xtravaganza and its place within the New York ball scene of the 1980s/1990s. From its legendary mother Angie (here called 'Angel') to the beautiful, doomed Venus Xtravaganza. This is not a book with happy endings and the end is - at times - remarkably difficult to read. The use of 'Spanglish' can also feel a bit jarring and takes a few chapters to get used to. (Venus also appears to be change nationality from Italian to Puerto Rican halfway through. This makes sense if you know that she was of Italo-Puerto Rican descent, but this isn't really explained by the writer, making their representation of her feel a bit muddled.)
But really, these are just nit picking. The story itself is beautiful and compelling - there is one scene particularly based at a ball which will sweep you up in a wave of total euphoria. This is a book which sits well within the pantheon of novels about New York and a must read for anyone wanting a primer in Queer History. Remember Queens, Reading is Fundamental!

⭐️⭐️⭐️ 3 Stars

This is not my usual genre so that probably played a part in me struggling with this book at times.

It felt like it took a long time for me to get into it and the mix of slang and I think Spanish also affected my reading of the story.

However the characters are written really well and the writing style is atmospheric and authentic.

This is a fascinating story based on real life characters in the New York underground drag ball scene. Four main characters who come together to form their own family and support network. There is fabulous fashion, witty one liners that made me laugh out loud and disco dancing. The outfits are described in such detail that I almost expected glitter to fall out of my kindle when I opened it. There is also abuse, murder, AIDS and entrenched inequalities that make the lives of these people so challenging. The descriptions of the burials on Hart Island was so sad, people so marginalised in life faced the same in death. There are some utterly heartbreaking scenes and the last quarter of the book is particularly dark.
The book is very good, but there is so much crammed into the pages, that sometimes I felt events are skimmed over when there should have been a little more detail. It is also written in the third person, so I never felt a close connection to any of the characters.
Thanks go to the publishers and net galley for the advanced copy in return for an honest review.

A great book looking at an interesting topic! I loved reading about this drag ball as I adore Paris is Burning and RPDR. There were times it seemed to be just okay and other times I loved it more than words can say.

Sorry to fall into the trap of identifying the writer with their characters, but I was blown away when I discovered that author Joseph Cassara is far too young to have observed New York City in the 1980's. This is a compliment, as I was in NYC for that decade, and while I didn't participate in the social milieu described, the details of place, fashion and language ring so true. A discussion by two young hustlers of the watches of rich people so obviously referred to the Movado fashionable then, that I was laughing aloud. I feel privileged to read about some people I wasn't able to know at the time.
Anyway, this is really a side point. The House of Impossible Beauties is a humane and funny novel about children becoming adults and discovering their trans/gender identity and their way in the world against very tough circumstances. Each character has her own spark of intelligence, sass, creativity or kindness and you'll be hoping that somehow everyone will get a happy ending, despite the book being set at the height of the AIDS epidemic in NYC. This could be a very depressing book, with prostitution, violence, family abandonment and more, but the people who live in the House try to see themselves as stars, winners of prizes and divas, and so will you. Lots of hispanic words thrown into the mix- that is the way NYC rolls, so author Cassara is authentic one more time... highly recommend

New York's underground drag ball scene flourished in the early 1980s. These glitzy, elaborately-themed events rose with meteoric intensity from the Harlem district, bringing with them an immense euphoria and camaraderie among the area's prominent GLBT population.

The House of Impossible Beauties follows the often complicated lives of several homogeneous characters from their confused, abused, traumatic childhoods to the magnificent heydays of their in-your-face draggery and wild expressionism.

New Jersey born author, Joseph Cassara, readily acknowledges that several of his novel's characters are based on historical figures (Venus Xtravaganza, Pepper LaBeija and Dorian Corey may be familiar to some readers), and locations in which much of his narrative is set, such as Christopher Street Pier - a once vibrant cruising spot, which is still a popular gathering place for young gay people - are now legendary landmarks.

The House of Xtravaganza is one of the most famous and enduring 'houses' (a sort of surrogate family for individuals of mixed gender identities), brought to prominence in the groundbreaking 1990 film documentary, Paris is Burning. Cassara's protagonist, Angel – the founding member and 'Mother' of this all-Latino collective – is quite obviously based on Angie Xtravaganza, the very real transgender star of the Harlem ball scene. Her drag daughter, Venus, and other members of the group are adopted 'house children', a close-knit coterie who engage in sex work in order to survive. They strive to defend, dignify and elevate one another, but are heartbreakingly vulnerable and can do nothing to protect their beloved hermanas from a mysterious sickness, often referred to by the predominantly unsympathetic and scaremongering media as a 'gay plague'.

Cassara's Hispanic trans-women and butch queens are sassy, charismatic and brave, and his exceptional debut novel is a humane microhistory of their uninhibited but precarious lives on the drag circuit of a bygone era.

RuPaul's Drag Race has found a global audience in recent years and I've been a huge follower of it since the third season. It's still one of the highlights of my life hearing RuPaul praise my blog on his podcast. (You can listen to the audio of this at the bottom of my intro page here.) The widespread fandom of this show has popularised drag as an art form again so it seems like the right time to look back at some of the most significant drag movements of recent history. The documentary 'Paris is Burning' captured instances of the fiercely outrageous ball culture in NYC in the mid-to-late 1980s. One of the figures memorialised on film was a drag queen named Venus from the house of Xtravaganza, the city's first Latino drag house. In his debut novel “The House of Impossible Beauties”, Joseph Cassara fictionally recreates Venus' story as well as tales about some of the other queens who were central to this drag family. It sympathetically follows the way these marginalized individuals were often ostracised by their families, but found sisterhood and support from fellow queens. Together they created and defined a sub-culture all their own. There are many moments of high drama and camp fun, but Cassara also emphasizes the hard gritty reality of their lives which involved prostitution, habitual drug use and AIDS. The novel skilfully invokes the aesthetic and feel of the era with a language and dialogue heavily inflected with Spanish phrases and drag lingo that totally draws the reader into this bygone world.

Part of the motivation behind creating the Xtravaganza drag house was that queer Hispanic individuals didn't feel like they could belong in the other drag houses at the time. A character named Hector notes in letter to a choreographer he admires “someone told me that you can’t join if you’re not black. I thought, Well, gee, I’m not black – but I certainly ain’t white. Especially if I’m talking Spanish, all the white people in Manhattan look at me like I might as well be black.” It's dismaying how a lot of queer culture that often satirizes and separates itself from mainstream straight culture still carries many reactionary prejudices within it. So some individuals within these drag houses exhibit signs of racial segregation, sexism and homophobia. As a result, Hector and drag queen Angel dream up and form a Latino drag house all of their own. The novel charts sections of this House's history from the early 80s to the early 90s.

Cassara's style of storytelling is somewhat choppy in how it portrays scenes from a particular time period, often introducing readers to new characters and then tunnelling back to give his characters' backstories. Significant scenes or events are often left out and only referred to and this usually strengthens the impact of the tale. For instance, one character's death from AIDS is only brought up in dialogue and the immediate aftermath of the death is shown in very brief flashes. It would have been entirely unnecessary to show the full journey of this character's death from diagnosis to the funeral. His death is felt all the more keenly because it's only a part of a tapestry of loss from this time period. The persistent and pernicious presence of the disease in the characters' lives is handled very well as is the near universal rejection the queens feel by their families (with the notable exceptions of Angel's supportive brother and Juanito's grandmother who indulges his penchant for dressing up.) However, it feels like there are one too many backstories of how male characters are rejected by their families because of their femininity. Instead, it would have been good if there were more scenes showing the drag balls themselves as there is only one instance of a competition portrayed in the narrative despite multiple trophies that adorn the shelves of the House of Xtravaganza.

This novel is a striking tribute to those who endeavour to create and inhabit beauty as a way of transcending the gruelling reality of life. It would have been easy to make it about over-the-top fabulousness and girrrlish ki ki. I admire how Cassara portrays the real dangers and precariousness of these drag queens' lives and pays tribute to their strength and artistry, but also acknowledges their occasional flaws and superficiality. There are many instances of humour from the challenges of wearing a snake as an accessory to how one queen notes that “The biggest shame in the whole world was that coke wasn’t a vegetable.” But, although the novel is true to life in representing how the majority of these queens' hard lives came to bleak ends, the narrative sometimes gets bogged down in the harshness of their persistent suffering in a way that felt very reminiscent of Yanagihara's “A Little Life”. It's difficult to imagine how lives marked by such tragedy could be told otherwise, yet I was left longing for some more levity towards the end. Nevertheless, it's an enthralling experience following these queens' powerful stories and I love how Cassara has dynamically brought them to life.