Worth Burning

A searing portrait of survival, Worth Burning traces a boy’s journey from a turbulent Southern childhood—marked by parental abuse, death, and hidden queerness—through the AIDS crisis, a marriage of convenience, and finally, towards a rugged self-acceptance haunted by the past.

Worth Burning crackles with the heat of a burn barrel. With a novelist’s attention to character and narrative trajectory, Mickie Kennedy glides through four decades beginning with the random hit-and-run that kills the ...