I have read two other of Andrew Joseph White's books, so I was excited to receive a copy of this ARC. As with all of his books, this one comes with words of warning. There are is violence throughout, but White handles it masterfully. Compound Fracture follows Miles Abernathy, a trans teenager growing up in West Virginia in the modern day. His family has faced and been a part of generational violence dating back a hundred years to the coal miners strikes. The relatives of those who committed the violence are still alive and perpetuating it toward Miles and his family and friends. Miles becomes the victim of violence at the hands of some of these same people, and what follows is a story of what justice means to Miles and those around him and how he wants to interact with the world. Meanwhile Miles is also dealing with being a teenager and growing into his feelings about being trans and autistic. There are students for whom this would be a much needed book; however, as noted, it comes with much caution. Thank you to Net Galley and the publishers for this ARC.

This is the third book that I've read by Andrew Joseph White and it was incredible. I've rated each of his books five stars and this is no exception. This leans more towards thriller than horror, and as someone who likes horror more than thrillers, I wasn't sure if I'd like it. I'm glad that I was proven incorrect though since this book worked really well as a thriller. It was suspenseful while still having some horrifying, and slightly paranormal, elements. I ended up accidentally reading this in one sitting because I couldn't put this book down. I felt like I was sitting on the edge of my seat, especially throughout the last 100 pages.

If anyone was hesitant to pick up White's other novels due to the horror aspects, I highly suggest reading this one. It's truly phenomenal and I enjoyed my reading experience.

Big thank you to Peachtree Teen and Netgalley for this ARC!

I rated it 4/5 on StoryGraph. This was hard to rate. There were lots of great stuff, but also some 'points' and plots that missed.

First off, the good stuff. The story took turns that I did not expect, but it was still somewhat realistic. The story was good and solid, and had me intrigued and hooked pretty early on. I was not sure where the story was headed, but I was not disappointed with the result! The queer representation and disability representation are a big plus, and was handled really well. I'm bisexual myself, and could definitely relate to many of the queer struggles that were mentioned in Compound Fracture.

On to the 'bad' stuff. I feel like many parts of the book were dragged out, to the point that I forgot where I was in the story. The inner monologue was important, but at some points it went on for pages when it shouldn't have. I also think the relationship between the characters had much more potential that wasn't used. The only relationship I found 'deeper' was Miles' relationship with his parents and Connor. There was so much more to explore with Dallas and the other characters, and this was honestly a missed opportunity. The sub-plot with Dallas had so much potential, but fell flat, in my opinion.

Overall, I enjoyed Compound Fracture and would definitely recommend it. I haven't read anything by Andrew Joseph White (yet, I haven't finished The Spirit Bares Its Teeth), so I can't compare it to earlier books. I might also be harsher than most, as none of the reviews by others mention what I considered 'bad'😅

yet another certified banger from AJW. this book had me STRESSING every page. thank you sir, your work is amazing

5/5 stars

Let me start off by saying please read the trigger warnings before reading this book, it does get pretty intense and graphic. That being said, I honestly loved reading this story. The characters are raw and vulnerable and relatable and the way it explains their individual flavors of neorodivergency is impeccable. I was so invested in the story that I quite literally could not put it down. It is very refreshing to see a depiction of parents who are trying and not getting everything right at first, but honestly loving their kids for who they are. The weaving together of family and suspense and politics was really amazing, this book was obviously a passion piece for the author and it shows. I loved it.

This is the second book I've read by Andrew Joseph White and I really have to place his debut higher on my tbr because he never disappoints.

"Compound Fracture" takes place in a small town where Miles Abernathy's family has a long blood-stained feud with the sheriff's family, one that he's trying to end - by finally having the upper hand. However, what he thinks will seal the case in his favor only makes it worse and lands him in the hospital, unveiling a series of events involving riots, gunshots, punches and murder, all the while unearthing some truths about the past.

First, I'd like to highlight the Miles' autism and how it was shown in a complete different light than in "The Spirit Bares its Teeth", which I don't think is easy to do. In queer terms, Miles' coming-out story brings me to tears and anger because of a certain scene that, while realistic, still pisses me off every time. On this matter, I must highlight two things: first, Dallas. I love me a non-binary iconic character that is so understanding and loveable you just want to hug them; second, (and I knew this AS SOON AS Miles mentioned romantic interest), ARO REPRESENTATION. I will read anything A-related. I will support all of the agenders, all of the aros, all of the aces. I am here for it. Being aroace myself, I will follow any representation I can get my hands on and it matters every single time. And the fact that the author didn't link aro and ace, but separated them? This means the world to me.

In short, as for the characters, I really liked Miles and I adored Dallas, I wish they had a little more appearances but I am content with what I was given. I adored Lady, I'm her number one fan. And to that one character I do not want to mention (also because spoilers), I knew you sucked from the start, I never trusted you and you got what you deserved.

Secondly, this book is more political oriented than the author's other books, which is, in my opinion, fantastic. I know it's explicitly said that Miles is a socialist (good for you hon) and knowing this, I knew it would be fair to assume that it would also be a commentary on the system that we currently live in and on capitalism in general. And I was right. I could write a full essay about this, solely based on this book, but I will sumarise: what the author could do, he did wonderfully, the commentary is just enough, without it ever feeling as if there are loose strings. The final pages really dig it in.

Lastly, I was on the edge of my seat to find out more not just about the blood feud and its roots but about Saint Abernarthy and the exact terms of what happened in the mines. Andrew Joseph White delievered and I gasped and told all my friends about it.

Overall, I truly enjoyed this book and I will be buying it and rereading it in the near future. I recommend it to everyone who wants a somewhat fast-paced story about the power of the working force and the people, mixed with a sense of justice (possibly results in murder and several injuries) and adorable platonic relationships.

Thank you so much to Peachtree Teen, Netgalley, and Andrew Joeseph White for this amazing opportunity to read his (the author’s) very first YA Story. With that, all I have to say about this is: Wow. What a powerful, compelling story about fighting against the system, healing generational trauma, highlighting trans people back in the 1900s (which is never really spoken about), and beating classism.

In this state of horrible politics, the rich getting richer, and police brutality this was a book that needed to be made. Especially with the upcoming election and the shadiness of both parties. As a nonbinary person living in a mostly red area where I am told that I’m ‘mentally ill’ or ‘I’m confused’, it's something that makes me keep going in the world.

I couldn’t put this book down, it kept me on the edge of my seat from beginning to end. Learning about how Miles grew into the person he was, seeing the sacrifices and inner monologue of how he was suffering from a family that held too much power in the small town he lived in. I also love how it showed how he took his power back after being humiliated and ridiculed by the sheriff’s son and friends.

But what stood out to me the most, was the characters. It felt like they were living, breathing, people that were making their voices heard by someone else. The story was a little slow in some spaces (the healing from the opioids and the courting between Connor and Miles) and there was a typo on page 217 (which, I love so much. Knowing that not everyone is perfect).

But once again, AJW had spun another hit for the girls, gays, theys, and everyone else in between.

andrew joseph white is a genius.

i love how this covers all different parts of the queer community. the family being supportive but also having to get to that point and struggling at first is so real.

his writing style is so addicting. the politics and suspense is incredible.

i had to stop reading multiple times because i got so stressed out. I LOVE ALL OF HIS BOOKS SO MUCH

COMPOUND FRACTURE by ANDREW JOSEPH WHITE - ARC REVIEW

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

“I could back away and leave and it’d be okay. But I don’t. Because my great-great-grandfather tortured strikebreakers, and my great-grandmother burned her sheriff alive, and Papaw shot a man right on his front porch, and I’m pissed.”

TW: Graphic violence, transphobia, opioid dependency, DV, animal harm

💚 This upcoming September 2024 YA horror release is AJW’s love letter to #WestVirginia from a queer, trans, neurodivergent perspective. It’s also a socialist manifesto. You don’t get one without the other, & #CompoundFracture lays out how political revolution becomes power for marginalized communities.

⛏️ Miles Abernathy is 16, trans, and a proud socialist. Miles’s family, the Abernathys, are descended from union miners. They are embroiled in a 100-year old blood feud with the Davieses, the family of the local sheriff. When Miles finds evidence that Davies was responsible for a car accident that killed people who were trying to unseat him, he becomes the feud’s latest victim as Davies’s son and his friends beat him nearly to death.

⛰️ Miles is threatened into silence, but embarks on a journey to free his town and family from the cycle of cruelty. Can he do it by any means necessary?

At first glance, this book is a revenge tale, but I was impressed by the more nuanced position Miles takes toward his peers as the novel progresses. There are no black-and-white answers to systematic oppression, and this book offers different solutions for different villains. Some, while evil, are victims of circumstance. Some, there’s no fixing, and deserve their karmic dog bite to the throat. (iykyk)

AJW has found the perfect home in the #horror genre. This book is genuinely disturbing, as it should be, but offers pockets of hope that queer kids in WV and beyond will recognize in their own communities. This book and its siblings are a reminder that fiction is a packaging of lessons to ourselves and the next generation.

AJW’s contributions to the YA market (trans, autistic main characters; searing political discourse) are invaluable.

Many thanks to @peachtreeteen and @netgalley for the ARC.

Nothing is more frustrating than one of your most anticipated reads ending in just being okay.

Hell Followed With Us was a powerhouse of a book, and I loved The Spirit Bares Its Teeth even though the gore made me nauseous, so I had to get off the operating table at times. And then came Compound Fracture, a thriller instead of horror, a genre that fits me much better. Until it didn’t …

Don’t get me wrong, I liked Compound Fracture; I just didn’t love it. The writing is still awesome, I wanted to pat Lady so many times, and I really enjoyed the autism and aro rep. And I loved Amber. But I didn’t connect to Miles as much as I wanted to and felt the plot was a bit … too much? It felt too black and white to me, or overdone, or too f*cked up, or … I actually haven’t got a clue because usually I like f*cked up stories. What I know is that I started to shift in my seat in discomfort and couldn’t shake off my disbelief about everything that happened.

I’ve seen raving reviews and am pretty sure many people will love this story, but sadly, I just found it okay.

I feel like I can put my trust in Andrew Joseph White to always deliver on a promise of a great book. I was especially excited for this book because I knew it was a personal story for the author and having read it I can wholeheartedly say that all eight years of caring this story in his heart is clearly felt by the reader. This story became especially personal to me because of the political situation in my country. Reading it corelated with me trying to find my course of fight in the political environment of my country, So the strong theme of self discovery and desire to be brave and fight for the right and fruitful cause that's prevalent in this book really helped and inspired me . Also, as someone who has ADHD and is still trying to understand if I have autism, Miles, his family, Amber and Dallas were extremely relatable and I'm forever grateful to the author for the care he puts in his characters. The conversation and the relationship between Amber and Miles brought me to tears(not for the first or the last time during the reading process) I've made a home out of this characters and the book and I will be missing them forever (or till the book comes out and I embark on one of my many re-reads of it).

andrew joseph white did it again……
this is pretty fast paced and gripping! I barely put it down. Definitely the primal scream of rage the author described it as. Pretty brutal in places. I enjoyed it a lot. it’s definitely less sff than his other books - the ghostly element is almost subtle - but that worked for me.

I was especially excited for this one because I heard the MC is aromantic and I’m so happy about it I think that was done well, certainly with more nuance and depth than I’ve come to expect from a lot of books that are super vague or mention it once - though it's still not a major focus.

It’s tackling some very large complex things politically and is very unsubtle and somewhat neat about it, - and I think some aspects could have used more nuance/elaboration? but also maybe that’s just not possible to fit in one little book. Still, lots of good stuff in here regardless.

every andrew joseph white book i have read has left me wanting more. this is no different. incredibly brutal tale. not much to say just that it was pure perfection.

i went into this book expecting to love it and it fulfilled all my expectations. wow. i devoured the second half of it in less than 24h.

i am not a YA reader most days but ajw never disappoints. i have never in my life set foot in the united states, so i was worried that some of the context of this novel would be lost on me, luckily that was not the case.

miles' character really resonated with me, although he is nothing like me - the way he's written is so human and compelling. the queer and nd representation is so good, (minor spoiler ahead) i love finally getting to read an aro character who isn't ace, and who is coming to terms with all of it. i loved this book. gonna get a physical copy as soon as its out.

This was a little bit of a difficult read for me, mostly because as opposed to AJW's other two books, this one is set a bit more firmly in reality. There's a lot talked about within the book: inequality, what do you do when the people who are supposed to protect you don't, small-town community and all the good and bad that come with it, queerness (specifically as it relates to being in small-town Southern US), communism/socialism. And that's just scratching the surface. While a lot of those discussions felt like they hit, I also felt that's kind of where the book let me down. Mostly because there was so much happening that, at times, the book's pacing felt a little bloated. Coupled with some stylistic decisions (single page chapters for dramatic emphasis), it felt like not everything got a chance to breathe.

But, honestly, that's really the only thing, at least for me. This was a tense, often brutal, book that didn't pull any punches. It's not my favorite AJW book, but it's one that I think makes a huge impact.

This was very different from the other books from this author, but in a very good way. I loved the full storyline and was struggling to put the book down

I loved Hell Followed With Us, so I was very excited to read Andrew Joseph White's next book. I absolutely adored Compound Fracture! A fun and witty read filled with intrigue and suspense.

Andrew Joseph White has once again produced one of the most stunning and viscerally descriptive novels of the year. (I always know a book is going to be exceptional when I am making a playlist before I am even 100 pages in!)

I will preface my review with this information; I am an autistic transgender man myself, who would be the same age as Miles, the main character of Compound Fracture. I spent the first 12 years of my life living in a small, rural, conservative town - though my experience was more Pacific Northwestern deserts than Appalachian - and Compound Fracture touched on that half of my life so sharply and with such realness that I often had to look up from the page to take a deep breath and recenter myself in the world around me.

SPOILERS BEYOND THIS POINT

The first part that had me thinking “this book will be 5 out of 5 stars” was when I was reading the last few moments before Noah Davies and his gang attacked Miles. Andrew Joseph White’s descriptions of Noah, Eddie, and Paul brought to mind people from my own childhood, often the boys that we all knew to avoid and followed with whispered warnings about the truly awful things they had done and which had been explained away by the adults in our lives with either apathy, their own cruelty, or fear akin to our own. Each moment describing Miles begging (in his own way) for mercy, barely surviving, and awaking, alone and afraid, in an impersonal hospital room sent cold shocks of recognition and fear down my spine. Andrew Joseph White continues to deliver on his promise of viscerally personal stories of horror and triumph and overcoming the harshness the world around us tries to write into our skin as a blood toll for existing from the first page, and I am delighted to report that this was consistent throughout the book.

Another part that had me tearing up and sucked further into the story in equal measure was the reactions of Miles’ parents to his coming out. I know that, thus far, Hell Followed With Us and The Spirit Bares Its Teeth have had very different coming out stories than Compound Fracture, but the stuttering, half-started, half-resisting awkward avoidance and denial present in Compound Fracture spoke very deeply to my own experience with coming out as a transgender man. I had fairly ‘liberal’ parents, and I was a teenager living in Arizona following the brutal 2016 election cycle who now had to contend with the ramping up genocide of transgender people in America. I was one of the luckier ones. Miles’ mother outright ignoring Miles’ words and shutting down conversations again and again harked back to the days of my senior year in college arguing back and forth with my own father about my experiences, and his father’s quiet, semi-confused but still mostly-supportive acceptance mirrored my mother’s steps into attempting to understand a world she was not a part of for her eldest son’s sake. The offers of therapy, the insistence that other things were more important, and the demands to keep one’s head down for the sake of safety - ignoring the half-life that would force you to live - were all a stark reflection of my teenage years. I, in many respects, understood what it was like to be Miles because I had been Miles for so long and I am so relieved to see those experiences put to the page by another trans author now that I am in a much healthier and more secure part of my life and transition. It was very cathartic to see the growth and learning that Mile’s parents take part in throughout the novel and how his family opens their arms to him and sets their minds to understanding his world.

The last 100 pages or so were so gripping that I forgot to take notes and update my view as I went. I was sneaking bits and pieces of it during work, reading when I would walk from room to room, when I would set out to use the restroom, and devouring what I could during my lunch hour. Miles’ struggle to come to terms with the idea that there are not good people nor evil people, just people who do good or evil things while stuck in the situations they are born into is absolutely fascinating to watch. I was a philosophy and politics major in college; I want to study law and public policy for graduate school Andrew Joseph White has laid out an absolutely beautiful examination of how sociopolitical circumstances can shape who we are, how we view right and wrong, and he even creates a frame in which he can express the idea that violence is often used for protection of the vulnerable in counter to the violence of the oppressive powers in our lives. The Red Holler, Davies, and Cooper are some of the best vessels of these ideas, and as before, Andrew Joseph White delivers his story and ideas with brutal and gruesomely efficient set of shocking images and events that have left me reeling.

In summary, this was easily one of the most enjoyable reads I have had this year, and I cannot wait until I can own th physical copy of this book. I look forward to seeing what will come from Andrew next!

ARC Review
I couldn’t read it fast enough. Every page left me dying to know what happened next.
It was an emotional journey. The characters are realistic in all their flaws and virtues, and you get to follow them step by step as they figure out what they want, their identities, and the world around them.
This book does not avoid the uncomfortable topics. It plows straight into them and gets dirty about politics, gender, and disability. The setting of rural West Virginia in 2017 was such a fascinating viewpoint into that time that created such a vivid and immersive world.

Andrew Joseph White has knocked it out of the park (again) with Compound Fracture. Miles is written so authentically as an autistic trans teenager, and seeing events from his perspective brings the reader right into the story. After he comes out to his parents, their relationship gets messy and complicated in a way that's almost painfully real. The town of Twist Creek and the people in it seem genuine, with all the dimension and nuance that are often lacking in depictions of Appalachia. This extends to the sheriff and others on his side, which adds to the gravity of the long-running feud dividing the town. Miles' inner turmoil feels realistic as he suddenly finds himself in the middle of the conflict and has some hard choices to make, on top of grappling with his identity and typical teenage struggles.

This joins the list of "books I wish existed when I was a teen" along with White's other work, and I'm sure there are plenty of teens now who need this story. I hope they find it.