Tell the Wolves I'm Home by Carol Rifka Brunt

June Elbus, a 14 year-old in Westchester, grieves for her favorite uncle, Finn, a successful, reclusive artst in Manhattan, who dies of aids at the start of Carol Brunt's debut novel Tell the Wolves I'm Home [Kindle]. It's 1987 and the suburbs' reaction to the pandemic is ignorance, hostility, fear, and indifference. June's family says Finn's longtime partner, a wayward hiv+ Brit named Toby whom they've never met, murdered Finn by infecting him to inherit his apartment and expensive art, and they hound him away from the funeral. Finn has left June and Toby notes begging each to take care of the other and the bulk of the story is their wary then warm secret friendship. June's problem isn't hiding it from her clueless, accountant parents but from her suspicious, jealous sister Greta, who plays Bloody Mary in the school production of South Pacific and is offered a role in Annie on Broadway. Finn's final painting was a double portrait of June and Greta which is featured in the NYT then lands on the cover of Newsweek. Skeptics of these rosy plot points may balk at the novel's lite grasp of aids, whose side effects are mainly thinness and a little shivering before death, but the book is surer of its sense of teen girl confusion and drama.