Review: "A Place for Us" by Brandon J. Wolf

A Place for Us by Brandon J. Wolf
Scheduled for release 6 June 2023 via Little A
★★★★

Wolf survived the Orlando nightclub shooting, but that's not where he starts the story: he opens the book in his childhood in Oregon, when he lost his mother at a young age. This would be a devastating and formative loss for almost any child, but for Wolf it came with an extra complication—he already felt other, and without his mother by his side it was a long, long time before he could truly feel that he had people in his corner, people who understood him.

It's roughly a third of the book in before Pulse is even mentioned, and that's intentional: the shooting was the catalyst for this book and a catalyst in Wolf's life, but it was representative of a great deal more than that. Wolf describes growing up knowing exactly how many other students in his school were Black, knowing that his white family wouldn't stand up against racial or homophobic slurs, and constantly needing to watch his back, because his school and his town were not safe places to be if you were different. (That Pulse was something representative of a safe space—and of chosen family—is not a new spin, and if you've read a think piece or two this won't come as new information. But Wolf doesn't belabour the point about Pulse here, focusing instead on the people who were his chosen family.)

I'm grateful that the book focuses less on what happened and who committed this violence and more on who and what were lost, because Wolf is right: the media conversation so quickly turns to othering and blame. Thoughts and prayers. The human stories get lost, and nothing changes. That said, on the subject of the media, not long before I read this (in December 2022), the New York Times reported that gun violence had become the leading cause of death for children in the U.S., surpassing motor vehicle crashes, cancer, and other causes for the first time. The Orlando victims didn't include children, but this book is still incredibly timely. Shootings have gone up, not down, and there have been so many mass murders that they blur together even when I look them up individually. (Tell me there is a systemic problem without telling me there is a systemic problem.)

This hovers somewhere between three and four stars for me. The story and timeline felt clearest in the first two thirds, and the writing sometimes felt unnecessarily dramatic—the material is dramatic enough not to need the flourishes. But I'm also reading this thinking why is this the first memoir about this that I've seen? Surely there have been others—it's been more than six years. But the people affected by this shooting tended to be in doubly marginalised groups (in many cases queer and Latinx; Wolf is queer and Black), and those aren't voices that are often amplified in the US. It's appalling that there is even a mass-shooting literature, but...there is, and Wolf's is a necessary voice in that literature.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a free review copy through NetGalley.