Starr Lyte by Blaise Bulot

Starr Lyte by Blaise Bulot
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Starr Lyte is a drag queen who can't read or write and lives in the ghetto of New Orleans. She frequently spouts profound wisdom, such as:

"Different strokes for different folks.
If all of us liked the same thing
Some of us would be awful lonely,
and the rest of us would be awfully sore"

I wanted to like this book more than I did. I'm wavering between three and four stars, I feel like four is what I wanted to give it, but three better reflects my experience.

Starr is charming, her cast of friends is wonderful to read about and you'll really enjoy spending a day in the life with her and her wild outlandish stories. It's subsequent days where the charm wanes a little. Several chapters are written in poor folk southern drawl, some of which just can't be understood, all written phonetically. It starts off being cute and a reminder of the down home south, but does begin to grate. All the chapters, most just a page or so, are in the same format, with a short vignette into Starr's life or one of her friend's lives, and while interesting, it does get repetitive.

I liked that this was a small press, I liked that it was by a gay author of colour, which is rare, I liked that it was set in the south, I liked that it was about drag queens. I just wanted to like it all a bit more.

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