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My rating: 4 of 5 stars (3.5 rounded up to a 4)
All the Things We Don’t Talk About is a queer contemporary fiction novel by Amy Feltman. The ebook version is 320 pages. We follow our four main characters with third-person points-of-view.
Morgan is a nonbinary teen raised by their single autistic father, Julien. Their mother, Zoe, has been out of the picture since she fled to Europe on Morgan’s first birthday. Zoe was just dumped by her on-again-off-again girlfriend Brigid, so she decides on a whim to return to the States. Over the years, Julian and Brigid became pen-pals and friends who commiserated over loving and losing Zoe multiple times.
This was a really cool premise, but it dragged for me at times. Zoe was a very unlikeable character for many reasons and I vastly preferred things when we were following either Julien or Morgan’s perspective. I was pleased with all of the queer representation in this book, but I do struggle with trauma porn queer lit and really would love to see more happy stories with queer characters.
I noted this in the content warnings below, but this book starts off with an attempted school shooting so please be aware of this before you pick it up.
Tropes in this book include: dysfunctional family, nonbinary main character, bisexual main character, autistic main character
CW: absent parent, drug and alcohol abuse, addiction, driving under the influence, underage drinking, school shooting (mentioned)
Special thanks to Grand Central Publishing and NetGalley for providing an eARC of this book for me to review. All opinions contained herein are my own.
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