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Compound Fracture by Andrew Joseph White
guys I lied about not creating a review oopsies (jk. I just changed my mind.) However, bc my brain turned into a soup with all the different opinions I read on this book, I give up on trying to give it a star rating. (Also because I feel this was comparatively weaker, in regards to AJW’s published works.) (P.S., I raised my TSBIT rating up by .25 stars.)

I’ll be doing my review in a list format, a la my I Feed Her To The Beast review.

Things I liked:
  1. As per usual, AJW’s autism rep hits, and the gore is fantastic.
  2. It’s incredibly rare to see alloaro rep in YA fiction and I liked how the questioning arc was handled. 
  3. Lady!! Not only was she a dog that stayed alive, but she was also an active character, and I rarely see or read that in thrillers/horror. I’ll admit I could tell when she was included for narrative convenience, but at her core she was very much just a dog, and existed outside of being a last-minute option for help.
  4. Miles’s moral dilemma regarding the murder was very interesting, even though it
    didn’t appear much in the plot after Cooper’s death.
  5. The family relationships were all interesting! They all felt like pretty realistic dynamics, too, and I especially liked how the adults were brought into the final act. And on the topic of characters, I also enjoyed Miles and Dallas’s friendship. Dallas was a lovable character and I loved how while they offered some support for Miles(even though they had very little information, too!), they still had moments of visible vulnerability. 
  6. Despite how difficult the story was for me to read (I’m in a pretty stressed and terrible emotional state right now), I couldn’t put the book down! There’s so much lore embedded into the Abernathy history and the entire plot, too.
  7. The bits of text speak were realistic for teenagers, actually.
  8. The tension, in the first quarter especially, was splendid. I loved how the story threw you into the action without a warning, and how Davies remained not just menacing, but a genuine threat to the cast.
  9. I listened along to the audiobook for the last 15 or so chapters (it sounds like a lot, but some of them are very short), and holy shit the narrator was fantastic!! They absolutely nailed each character’s emotions and personalities. Now I wish I’d listened to the entire book, too.

Things I didn’t like:
  1. While I have no issue with important characters that aren’t meant to be good people, I could predict where Cooper’s arc would go from the moment the haircut scene happened.
    Him turning out to be a transphobic shitheel and betraying Miles’s trust reminded me too much of Theo from HFWU, and I found the deadnaming from him specifically to be unnecessary. I think I’m just starting to notice a trend in AJW’s books though where the guy the MC trusts most to affirm or support him ends up completely turning against and misgendering him.
  2. While I appreciate that YA with radical politics (and bits of strike history) like this one can exist, a lot of the concepts and philosophy felt repeated. (I also feel like the ending was a too optimistic when it came to the overwhelmingly conservative population statistics… surprisingly, a lot of Miles and his family’s actions went unchallenged?)
  3. Re: politics, socialism and communism were talked about interchangeably…
  4. The tension was slightly lessened by the pacing. Miles had a lot of shit to figure out, between his family’s safety, coming out, figuring out his sexuality, and figuring out he’s autistic, but it buffered the plot. I was expecting more carnage from the intense beginning, and very little of the book after that was actual murder.
  5. While the story is technically paranormal, the ghost elements are sparse. Not in a way that makes them ambiguous, though, so it just becomes a little frustrating to see how little they affect the events of the plot?

The reviews across StoryGraph and Goodreads seem to still be overwhelmingly positive, but I’m very curious to see everyone’s thoughts because I can definitely see this becoming the most divisive of Andrew Joseph White’s books.