I finished The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai last night. It was a wonderful, wonderful book, and a devastating one. I think kitschlet made this same observation on Mastodon when she posted about it recently (and thank you, Kitsch, for putting it on my radar!), but it's wild that the last Makkai I read was just, like, a murder mystery, and this one is a multi-timeline saga about the generational effects of catastrophes like the AIDS crisis and also WWI and the Spanish flu. Like, okay. Did not know girlfriend had the range! It makes me want to revisit the only other Makkai I've read—The Hundred-Year House, which I remember precisely about nothing about^†—and see what I think of it now.

The characters in The Great Believers felt incredibly human; one of the protagonists, Yale, genuinely came to feel like a real person that I knew. Based on the acknowledgments at the end of the book, Makkai interviewed tons of people who lived through Chicago's AIDS crisis and were willing to tell her about some of their most difficult memories, and the care she put into honouring those stories shows. The book was somehow both a page-turner—I needed to know what happened next—and increasingly difficult to read as it went on because I knew characters were going to die and I did not want to see them die. That's a testament, I think, to how well Makkai executed her story that was in part about knowing your friends are going to die and wanting to freeze time to keep from ever having to see it happen.

^†This is a lie. For some reason, I remember the detail that one of the characters in Hundred-Year House ghostwrote for a tween book series in the vein of Baby-Sitter's Club and got fired because he introduced an eating disorder storyline without permission. I remember literally nothing beyond that, though, including how I felt about the book.