- Olivia Brooks
- Oct 20
- 2 min read
Compound Fracture by Andrew Joseph White
by Xanthippe Pack-Brown
There is more to the eye than bubbling creeks and stretching mountains in Twist Creek County, West Virginia. If you squint just right to get a good view of the skeletons of coal mines and rusted over railroad spikes, you find something far more sinister than black lung. Enter Miles Abernathy, a young transgender man going into his senior year of high school, which for most kids his age, is their biggest worry, but Miles has some bigger fish to fry, with the decades old bloody feud that plagues his family and twists and turns through Twist Creek county. Because a class war isn’t enough, he also has recently come out to his family as transgender.
Andrew Joseph White brings forward those who are historically shoved into the background. As a transgender, autistic man himself, he writes stories for those who traditionally do not get to tell their own. Not only does White do this with Compound Fracture, but this pattern continues in his other New York Times bestselling horror novels, Hell Followed With Us and The Spirit Bares Its Teeth. We see this employed with Miles as the protagonist of Compound Fracture.
Miles is a young man coming up in an unkind place. He is born into a class war that began generations back in his family with Saint Abernathy, a man who was murdered by someone from the Davies family shoving a railroad spike down his throat. Now, the Davies family rules the roost in Twist Creek County, being the sheriff and all. And Miles, he is no stranger to trouble. He has spent most of his childhood learning everything and anything he can about this blood feud and his family history, with some identity politics and socialism on the side. As the novel progresses, we watch Miles grow up alongside his few worthwhile friends and accepting family, while many others are not so lucky.
I never thought I would stumble into a book about generational trauma, transgender and neurodiverse issues, and socialism that is also a body horror coming of age novel. Andrew Joseph White gives us all this and more in Compound Fracture and is part of a larger movement of altering the very fabric of how we are understanding young adult fiction.
XANTHIPPE PACK-BROWN is a second year MA student in Literature, Media, and Culture at Florida State University. They study transgender literature and critical theory, and are branching out to other forms of media. Xanthippe is also an active member of the graduate assistant labor union, Graduate Assistants United, where they do a little bit of this and that, but mostly work on the bargaining effort.
ANDREW JOSEPH WHITE is the trans, autistic, and bestselling author of Hell Followed With Us, The Spirit Bares Its Teeth, Compound Fracture, and more. Born and raised in the Shenandoah Valley, he received his MFA in Creative Writing from George Mason University, and lives in Virginia with his wife and their antisocial cat.