Compound Fracture

Starred review from June 24, 2024
Autistic transgender 16-year-old Miles Abernathy and his socialist family have been feuding with Twist Creek’s governing powers ever since a former sheriff killed Miles’s great-great-grandfather, who led a labor strike a century ago. After finding proof of current sheriff Davies’s involvement in a fatal incident that injured Miles’s father and disrupted locals’ efforts to have Davies removed from power, Miles and his friend Cooper are violently attacked by the sheriff’s son and his gang. Following the assault, Miles is haunted by a strangely familiar figure wearing a red bandana and ends up embroiled in deadly, simmering tensions that will change the course of Twist Creek forever. Frank and evocative language by White (The Spirit Bares Its Teeth) confronts harrowing circumstances surrounding what decades of being “crunched under the boot of a rightwing government”—and the failure of Twist Creek residents to engage with Appalachia’s long history of worker-centered advocacy—have wrought within the region. White’s latest is a
stunning testament to the intertwining realities of politics and queerness, as well as community focused ideologies and
the impact of those ideals in the face of oppression. The protagonists cue as white. Ages 14–up. Agent: Jennifer March Soloway, Andrea Brown Literary.