Compound Fracture

Yeah I nearly missed a meeting for this. This book is one of the most political reads of my year and I want to tell that everyone who assumes that Young Adult cannot be that political. This one is. Not only because the main character is trans, autistic and aromantic (and only aware of one of these), but also because Miles is a socialist and this is bascially the story about a bloody feud between two families. This book is rather a political thriller with body horror elements than actual horror, though the horror may lie in the violence, the classism, the power struggles. However, Miles does also love his home city even though it is rural and poor and his family is persecuted for decades, and this was an interesting perspective. It is awesome how this book manages to portray family, kinship, and found family in a heartwarming way while also depicting a circle of violence that Miles get caught in. It is equally awesome how pretty much every character makes morally ambigious decisions, how they are sometimes left without choice, and how this book discusses moral and justice in an extremely complex way. Characters are complicated and sometimes it is hard to say who deserves what and who is likable, and this is a sign of immensly good writing. It was also great to have representation of an aromantic character who seems to be allosexual. There is a lot of queer representation (also queerphobia, please check out the content warnings) and that was amazing. There is just one thing that bugged me a bit, nothing big, but its spoilery: I was't really a fan of the introduction of the queerplatonic relationship. Don't get me wrong, I'd loved to have more rep on that, but it felt so sudden and like it's not really getting space and the characters not having any build-up until then. Like it would have been fine for them to be friends, so this whole thing came out of the blue for me and I missed any real development up to that. For me, it felt a bit like "oh this character is aromantic so we can't give him a romantic relationship as a happy end so what's the next thing close to that?" while I'd wish that it would be fine for aromantic characters to not be in a committed relationship too, for any character, actually. So, as I said, yay for queerplatonic relationships in general, but this one felt kinda forced because it was so sudden.