TandeWrites

I received an eARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I will preface this review by saying that I did love the book, and the only major flaws I have are the fact that I prefer the author’s horror works as they’re a genre and subject matter that speaks more to me. I loved Hell Followed With Us and The Spirit Bares Its Teeth so much that anything else pales in comparison.

Compound Fracture is a book about a teenager who survived an attempted murder with the help of an ancestor who died in the West Virginia coal wars, only to get drawn into a struggle between the rural poor and those who exploit them. It is the story of a century-long blood feud and how people are moved to violence when facing extreme hopelessness in working class Appalachia, told through a trans and autistic viewpoint. This book reads so clearly as a love letter to the region and the working class and not wanting to leave your hometown, even if it almost kills you because it’s still yours. The author masterfully weaves in the perspective of both the oppressed and the oppressors in this town, and the reader soon realises that desperate times and desperate measures mean that the lines are often blurry between the two.

As always, the author’s representation of trans and autistic perspectives is incredibly important to me, and he usually centres topics that I care about. However, in this book more than his others, I felt the storytelling focused more on being morally correct and woke than being interesting and complex. Some scenes rely on telling over showing and made me feel a little detached from the story. There are also many moments when Miles must always be in the right, no matter the circumstance. The book is written through first-person narration, and his internal monologue portrays him as correct in any situation. For example, he always finds a way to justify planning and committing murders. I’m not overly fond of books that moralise minority voices to this extent. 

I think my main flaw in this book was the pacing. The bulk of the story moves slowly due to it being dedicated to characters standing around having conversations (which often does work when those conversations are furthering the storyline, but not when it feels like the characters are having slight variations in the same conversations over and over again), a small part is dedicated to watching the main antagonist act as what I perceive to be a caricature of a cartoon villain, and an even smaller part focused on what drew me to the book in the first place: turning the tide of the blood feud. A part that stands out to me is a high-tension scene where the author dedicated multiple pages to the protagonist monologuing about the book’s thesis statement in the middle of a character being shot. The story grinds to a halt for many moments and this change of topic mid-scene threw me out of the story, and this recurring lack of urgency made me stop reading and take a break several times.

One of my favourite small parts of this book is how the author presents a main character with parents who don’t understand them, but they’re trying. They don’t understand their son’s desire to transition, and they misgender and deadname him constantly, but the moment his safety is threatened, they’ll support him no matter the cost. Additionally, I did enjoy Miles’ journey to autism acceptance, and how signs of his parents having similar undiagnosed traits were continually shown. This was one thing they really did understand and accept about Miles unconditionally. The autism representation was very well done and oddly reminiscent of my own experience, to the point where it felt like I was reading about myself during some scenes. In my opinion, the relationship between Miles and his parents (even outside of the autism acceptance) was the most intriguing and developed in the book. As this is a book with strong family themes, I do wish they appeared more often on the page as Miles spends a lot of his time with his boyfriend or his former childhood best friend.

Overall, this book is about the importance of community and forcibly carving out a space for yourself to exist in inhospitable conditions, and that almost overshadows the fact that everything I liked about the book also comes with a negative. The story is unsettling and heartbreaking, but the thread of hope woven throughout is evident.