rushthatspeaks | Split, Swati Avasthi

This is a young adult novel concerning the aftereffects of domestic violence.

If, as I did, you spent portions of your adolescence in the YA section of the library reading those Extremely Serious Problem Novels, each about one Social Issue and with a writing style somewhere on the verge of terrible, that sentence is not inclined to make you want to read this book. However, this is in fact a young adult novel about the aftereffects of domestic violence. It is not about stereotypes, it is not about Social Issues, and it starts where most books of this sort leave off, which is to say that it starts with its sixteen-year-old protagonist decidedly out of his parents' house permanently and trying to rebuild a life with the family member he knows to be safe, his older brother.

Of course, it's not that easy. It never is. And while there's plenty of drama in the book, it in my opinion never has to resort to the kind of plot you get in bad thrillers in order to point out that it's not that easy.

This is not a perfect book. I felt that the resolution, while it was true to the process people go through when dealing with these issues, involved several people making progress much faster than I thought was really totally plausible. I have minor quibbles with Wnpr zbivat onpx va jvgu Puevf; V ernyyl gubhtug gurl pbhyq obgu hfr gurve bja fcnpr sbe n juvyr.

But it's one of the best books I've read at depicting the way people who have been abused have entirely different conceptions of boundaries from people who haven't, and the ways that that does and does not form a bond between people who have been abused. And that's very rare to see in fiction.

Highly recommended.

I got this in an ARC chain organized by