The Beautiful Ones

It doesn t matter whether you re a Prince fanatic or if your interest is simply piqued by all things music or pop culture: The book is worth picking up. . . . The Beautiful Ones is not a read, but an experience, an immersion inside the mind of a musical genius. You are steeped in Prince s images, his words, his essence. . . . The way the book is structured simply makes one want to read it again, to leaf through the pages and be immersed in Prince s world. . . . The book can be a starting point for a Prince fascination, or a continuation of long-standing admiration. Either way, it will deepen the connection of any reader with the musical icon. USA Today ( out of four stars)

Everything Piepenbring shares about being a fan chosen to work with one of his idols resonates. . . . [He] doesn't just want to write this memoir with Prince, he wants to do it right. . . . This means we get a memoir that is written by Prince, literally. Handwritten pages he had shared with Piepenbring make up Part 1, taking us from his first memory his mother s eyes through the early days of his career. . . . We also get a memoir that is carefully curated by Piepenbring, who writes that he was able to go through Paisley Park, room-by-room, sorting through Prince s life. . . . The Beautiful Ones doesn't paint a perfect picture. . . . It s not definitive. It can t be. It shouldn t be and, thankfully, it doesn t try to be. . . . It s up to us to take what s there and make something out of it for ourselves, creating, just as Prince wanted. NPR

[The Beautiful Ones] delivers much, much more than we had any reason to expect. . . . Prince took the project very seriously, and it shows in the work he delivered. . . . It shines an intimate and revealing light on the least-known period of his life his childhood which is embellished with family photos, notes and other ephemera. The book does not scrimp on detail: Prince s handwritten manuscript, rendered in his famously precise cursive script . . . is reproduced in full. . . . The initial segment of that closing section is one of the most fascinating parts of the book: a reproduction of a photo album, with captions by a presumably young Prince, containing a couple dozen pictures from his trip to California to record his debut album, ranging from shots of him in the studio to candids of him and his friends. . . . The Beautiful Ones brings so much new information to light that it s hard to imagine anyone being disappointed. Variety

[The Beautiful Ones] is an affirmation of Prince s Blackness and humanity. . . . The memoir is a handbook for the brilliant community, wrapped in autobiography, wrapped in biography and thus, it s an inspiration. . . . Prince writes about his childhood with clarity and poetic flair, effortlessly combining humorous anecdotes with deep self-reflection and musical analysis. . . . Prince is one of us he just worked to manifest dreams that took him from the North Side of Minneapolis to the Super Bowl. [The book] encourages us to tap into our power to design the lives we envision for ourselves and set a precedent for future generations to do the same. HuffPost