I finished A Sharp Endless Need by Mac Crane with tears on my face and gravel in my chest. It’s a book that hurts and holds, like an ice bath for tender queer hearts: shocking, raw, strangely soothing. Crane gives us Mack—a fiercely competitive high school basketball player, a closeted queer teen, a grieving daughter navigating the electric tension of first love and the deep grief of all the things she can’t say aloud.

Set against the backdrop of early 2000s suburbia—complete with Sixers jerseys, Wet Seal, and Allen Iverson posters—Crane’s novel pulses with desire, despair, and the desperate hunger to be seen. Mack’s love for her best friend and teammate, Liv, is all sweat and eye contact, late-night phone calls, and bruised bodies sharing court space and grief. Their bond is both intoxicating and tenuous, as much about what’s withheld as what’s spoken. On the basketball court, they’re poetry in motion; off it, they’re a car crash in slow motion.

Crane’s prose is lush, physical, and deeply interior—Mack’s voice aches with need, shame, and sharp self-awareness. This is not a tidy coming-out story. It’s a gutting portrayal of how queerness can be both a revelation and a risk, especially in environments saturated with repression, silence, and toxic masculinity. There are moments where Mack thinks queerness can’t ruin her life if she just never names it. God, am I familiar with that thought.

This book is for the girls with calloused hands and guarded hearts. The ones who fell in love with their best friends in locker rooms and car rides, who measured their desire in eye contact and shared playlists. For the sapphics who didn’t get an easy first time, or who loved someone who couldn’t love them back out loud.

And it’s for the ones who lost parents too young and had to rebuild a future with grief in their backpack. Mack’s relationship with her dad, flawed and tender, layered with masculine pride and unspeakable queerness, is one of the most nuanced depictions of loss I’ve read in a while.

A Sharp Endless Need isn’t easy. It tackles trauma, queer shame, corrective violence, and the devastation of untethered longing. But it’s also a radiant testament to survival, to reinvention, to queer kids who find meaning even after the game ends.

This novel felt like getting dunked in heartbreak and hauled back up by hope. If you like your queer stories devastating, tender, and absolutely unafraid to go there, this one will live in your chest for a long, long time. Thank you, Mac Crane, for all the gay yearning - it broke my heart once again.

📖 Read this if you love: raw, aching queer coming-of-age stories; intimate depictions of first love and grief; or books by Ocean Vuong.

🔑 Key Themes: Queer Longing and Shame, First Love and Friendship, Survival and Reinvention, Silence and Unspoken Desires.