Honestly, this is a complete mess. The first 30% is almost completely unreadable due to the way oyster and bird fThank you to Netgalley for the e-ARC!
Honestly, this is a complete mess. The first 30% is almost completely unreadable due to the way oyster and bird facts are spliced through right in the middle of scenes for several paragraphs. It breaks the flow of the story and makes it incredibly hard to follow what’s going on.
I liked Blas and Chango’s relationship (albeit, I liked Chango a lot more as I could avoid the bird tangents) but other characters aren’t at all notable.
There’s a lot of interesting ideas in here, especially near the end, but it’s buried in what feels like a painful first draft. There’s a lot that needs to be fixed before this can be published....more
I 100% understand why people love this book so much. The characters are lovely and very easy to get attached to and there’s this whole foDNF @ 20%
I 100% understand why people love this book so much. The characters are lovely and very easy to get attached to and there’s this whole found family thing that I can get behind.
But the romance is so fucking weird. Ox and Joe met when they were 16 and 10 and even if they have a relationship when they are older (17 and 23 is still a weird age gap btw) there are vibes immediately. And even if there wasn’t an age gap I can’t see myself getting behind the relationship anyways because it’s also DEEPLY annoying and employs some of my least favorite tropes ever. This is pretty bad considering this book is a romantic at its core and if I don’t like the main couple I’m not going to like most of it. And I’m not going to stick around for 10 hours of the audiobook to see if the romance can stop creeping me out.
Gordo and the garage guys are the saving grace of this book. I’ll probably read a plot summary or something so I can read Ravensong for him....more
**spoiler alert** (view spoiler)[Thank you to NetGalley for providing this ARC!
Actual Rating: 1.5 Stars
First things first:
I am trans, I am autistic, **spoiler alert** (view spoiler)[Thank you to NetGalley for providing this ARC!
Actual Rating: 1.5 Stars
First things first:
I am trans, I am autistic, I spent much of my childhood in a rural small town, and my family is very stereotypical “white trash.” I feel like I have a right to critique the themes and topics presented in this book as they are very personal to me and I have cared about them for years.
Second:
On the race point, I’ve been informed that West Virginia is overwhelmingly white (91.2% white to be exact) and that’s the reason racism is a non-topic in this. I still stand by my original point. I think that people should stop saying it’s “about the South” when this is about one state with a unique history and social climate compared to the rest of the South. Honestly, in the research I’ve done since being informed, it’s debatable whether West Virginians even identify with the South. I still believe the topic of conservative rural white people is just as much of a racial issue as a class one but a state that originally broke away from Virginia because they didn’t want to join the Confederacy (as the author states several times) and a region of the U.S. that had it’s foundations laid by chattel slavery are going to have very different racial tensions. So, just be aware and stop saying this is “about the South”.
Now Onto The Review!!
The Good
-The exploration of Miles’ aromanticism was the only natural and kind of subtle part of the writing. It was very personal while not being made into a Big ThingTM. Quite realistic and was probably one of the best parts of the book.
-On the topic of writing—just from a craft perspective this was a vast improvement from Hell Followed With Us (other than the pacing). The prose is objectively well-constructed and Miles has more of a personality than Benji ever did. The writing is eminently readable, which is why I only finished the thing in a day and a half. Gold star.
-Cooper! Cooper carried the entire book on his back. This baby can fit so much trauma, repression, and class rage in him. Up until the 80% mark when AJW popped a squat all over his character, Cooper’s morally gray vigilante shtick was the best part of Compound Fracture. Admittedly, it is strange that the kind of abusive cis, straight(?) boyfriend of the trans protagonist being the one who gets to have all the moral complexity and intrigue seems to be a trend in AJW’s books. But Cooper’s interactions with Miles were the only parts of the book that had me genuinely pondering. Yeah, they’re killing awful people but they’re also killing other children for what are, at their core, selfish reasons. It’s a good setup! Might force the audience to think for themself! And in a perfect world, this book would be primarily about Cooper and Miles’ fuckass Veronica/JD dynamic but God hates when I have nice things.
-Miles’ family is at the heart of this book and that’s ultimately a good thing. While I do wish that this would have been explored with a lot more subtlety and time than is afforded, their family dynamic is very bittersweet. I appreciate they’re more left-leaning and their response to Miles’ transness is awkward but ultimately resolved. It reminded me a lot of my family (which did not make me sad! Fuck you!). This sort’ve family dynamic is incredibly important to trans narratives. I’m happy it was here.
-Miles coming to terms with his autism was relatable and refreshing.
The Bad (+the Ugly)
-On a lesser note, the pacing and plot was sosososososo bad. First draft written on a Monster Energy bender at 3am level of bad. 75% of the book is just dawdling (no, I am not kidding), 20% of it is the boring MacGuffin plot, and 5% actual murder. People are just around for 400 pages. This book probably could’ve been cut in half and almost nothing would change narratively. I guess you could say this is character-driven but again, these characters are uninteresting and about as subtle as an anvil to the face. Also, as much as I like the murder, it built to nothing in the end, didn’t it?
-I don’t know how to say this other than the fact that the way conservatism was portrayed in this book is so…odd. The overwhelmingly conservative politics of Twist Creek are swept under the rug and only mentioned in passing. This, to me, is already a failure to engage properly with your themes. Conservatism and how it evolves into scapegoating amongst the working classes is a HUGE part of this issue. It would be the first thing I would dissect. It’s a massive oversight to barely acknowledge it. It doesn’t help that the people of Twist Creek are victimized in a way that’s honestly dehumanizing (you’re telling me that a politically conservative, America-loving, gun-blazing town would be super cool with working with Communists and trans people in the end? Are you serious?). Yes, rural working-class people are oppressed under capitalism. Yes, they are unfairly stereotyped by mainstream libertarianism. And yes, many of them are probably leftists in deep denial (and some are just straight up commies! They do exist!). But they are still autonomous human beings who can do bad things. They still help to uphold the systems that hurt them and especially hurt those who are more marginalized than they are. They still perpetuate racist and queerphobic violence.
Yes, it is important to have empathy for the rural working classes! It is so important and it is something I’ve been trying to convince people of for a very long time. But portraying them as all “secretly agreeing with us all along guys they’re actually progressives” isn’t helpful either and erases the reality. I think AJW did this to make the citizens of Twist Creek more likable but it comes off as silly to me. You can have empathy for a group of people you don’t like/disagree with. It’s called having nuance.
(Something to add: AJW could’ve taken the opportunity to discuss why conservative politics end up running rampant within rural communities. Such as the deliberate underfunding of public education, the very limited access to higher education, and how even internet access is limited for many people (I’ve had family members have to travel 45 minutes to an hour because they had to use cafe WiFi to get homework done). This is, imo, much more layered and sympathetic than casting the conservative population of Twist Creek as mostly nameless, faceless blobs with little to no motivation. Or just making them straight up evil in the case of the few named conservatives.)
-This connects to the previous point and it’s what I like to call the LET MILES BE WRONG problem. Miles always has to be in the right, all the time, whenever the situation calls for it and this extends to his inner monologue. He has a perfectly woke thought process, is portrayed as correct in any conflict he’s in, he only accidentally killed someone, and the only murder he’s actually responsible for is arguably in self-defense and he killed a guy that was evil to the point of parody, so was it that bad anyways?? The most morally questionable decision he makes is deciding to kill one of the guys who attacked him with Cooper. A decision that he immediately goes back on once he hears the guy’s tragic backstory (in which I audibly yelled out NO) and retroactively removes any complexity he once had. The one thing he maybe actually did wrong was give a burgeoning local Communist party the MacGuffin which he stole from his dad without telling him. This is resolved immediately and never brought up again.
I genuinely hate this. Other people may disagree with this, but I hate it when characters with my identities are moralized to this degree. It is some of the most othering shit. It makes their characters worse too. Like, are you seriously telling me that a trans teenage boy feels no resentment or at least ambivalence toward people who helped get Donald Trump elected into office? His love for West Virginia is just completely uncomplicated? I don’t know a single progressive from “Trump Country” who doesn’t have a complicated relationship with their home state, much less a fucking trans person. Let Miles be complex! Let him be angry in a way that isn’t “reasonable” or palatable! He’s a poor, sixteen-year-old trans teenager from West Virginia. No one is expecting him to be morally or ideologically pure.
-The villains were so obnoxious and exaggerated that they were weirdly fun. The first guy that gets killed is an ugly pedophile, which gets repeated over and over again just so you don’t feel bad for him even though he was a child who died brutally. The sheriff’s son is just a straight-up Satan spawn who is implied to have a gore and violence fetish. The Sheriff is mustache-twirling evil but also his relationship with the town is so archaic it’s almost feudal. Like why is this man the only wealthy person in town? It’s the most literal way to portray the 1% I’ve ever seen. The more I found out he owned the more I started giggling which is not helped when one of the side characters reveals that his family is ultimately the modern-day equivalent of his medieval serfs. Also, not how that works anyway. Usually, there is a wealthy community within a small town that has the police in their pocket. Because that’s what police are for. They uphold state violence and the status quo. They’re not literally the government.
-Why do the Abernathys and the Davieses have a century-long feud? Why are they not regular people? It’s so stupid. Having these be “special” families with a generation-spanning hatred honestly takes away from your theme there, bud.
-Miles should’ve spent a lot more time with his family. This book is supposedly about family and his family is connected to the main plot, but he really only spends maybe a quarter of the book around them. Instead, Miles spends most of his time on page with his boyfriend or best friend from middle school. It’s a consequence of the plot’s lack of focus and that there is no urgency at all.
-The “rural” elements weren’t necessarily wrong but were so on the nose it took me out of the story. The characters speech, the way they dressed, their gestures, etc; they all felt familiar but handled with absolutely no finesse or subtly. It was honestly uncanny valley.
-Half the time this reads like poor people trauma bingo.
-I can’t explain why, but every leftist in this book feels like a caricature. This is how someone who only knows about anti-capitalism from five tweets and secondhand sources would write a group of communists. It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.
-This is a pettier point, but during a high-tension scene, AJW drops the book’s entire thesis in like five humongous paragraphs before someone gets shot to death. I mean, RIGHT in the middle of the scene and everything just screeches to a halt. I too wanted to kill a man.
I really want to like AJW’s books. Trans-autistic perspectives are extremely important to me and he always manages to write about topics I care about. But this method of storytelling that cares more about being morally correct in the eyes of Twitter than telling interesting stories is exhausting. Maybe I’ll see how his adult debut goes. Something’s gonna have to change real quick because this extreme overreliance on “tell over show” may fly with YA reader audiences but it won’t with adult sff. (hide spoiler)]...more
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