Compound Fracture

Compound Fracture is an unflinching blood-filled thriller/light horror standalone novel by Andrew Joseph White. Released 3rd Sept 2024, it's 384 pages and is available in hardcover, paperback, audio, and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links and references throughout. 

This is marketed as YA, but fair warning, it's *very* brutal in places. It's exceptionally well written, honest, direct, and truly worthwhile, but so bloody and graphic. Having grown up in WVa, and seen firsthand the generational trauma, poverty, desperation, widespread bone-deep racism/sexism/homophobia and violence, the author does an impressive job of getting inside the almost inexplicable choices a lot of the people growing up in rural conservative communities make politically (to continue to be exploited, as long as there are *some* people who are even *more* marginalized and abused than they themselves are). Trigger warnings, homophobia, ableist abuse of neuroatypical/autistic people, transphobia, graphic violence, body horror, opioid abuse, sexual abuse, generational trauma, poverty, and certainly some I'm missing.

It's raw. It's very very well written. 

Four and a half stars. Not an easy read. It would be a good choice for public library acquisition. Likely far too violent/triggering for school library. It's politically relevant to a degree that would make it a very good choice for gender studies/Appalachian studies, allied subjects (American southern rural politics/culture/literature), and allied subjects. 

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.