You’re No Better
Written by Andrew Joseph White
Author of The Spirit Bares Its Teeth (BCCB 9/23) and Compound Fracture (BCCB 10/24), Andrew Joseph White is exceedingly brilliant when it comes to challenging his reader with his work in the horror genre, and his latest outing, You’re No Better, is no exception, centering on teenaged Morgan, who, as a young child was enlisted by a serial killer—his father—to aid in the capture, torture, and eventual murder of fifty-one women and girls across Virginia and the greater Washington D.C. area. Morgan is also an autistic trans boy denied access to transition throughout the majority of his story via the chokehold of parental rights. As Morgan attempts to navigate self-definition amid intense public scrutiny after turning his father in, White yet again interrogates not only traditional children’s literature’s conventions of being a “likable” protagonist, but also normative expectations of what it means to be trans or to transition “correctly.”
Readers are introduced to Morgan as a public spectacle confined in a private hell as he waits to visit his murderous father, Graham Nathaniel Slaughter, in prison while listening to true crime podcasts that constantly misgender Morgan and theorize over his potentially genetic psychosis. When prison guards arrive to escort him to visit Nathaniel; Morgan’s mother Bellamy intervenes, arguing with the guards about letting exploitative documentarians film their conversation. None of this is new family behavior: Morgan’s been complicit with Nathaniel since he was eleven, and Bellamy used Morgan’s early autism diagnosis to launch her career as a feminist “mommy blog” influencer. Now, she chases the true crime trend and holds Morgan’s financial future to medically transition hostage in exchange for his participation—as her damaged daughter—in the documentary. The toxicity of it all leaves Morgan unable, or unwilling, to recognize his own harmful behavior and that of others, particularly with nonbinary love interest Felicity, who blackmails Morgan into uncovering the name of the fifty-first murder victim for their grisly podcast; he also lashes out at his only friend/pseudo sister, Alyssa, whose unimpeded transition he deeply resents.
While White’s protagonists are often “bad” victims, Morgan is intrinsically designed to be hard to root for, with the issue of likability itself diegetic in true crime fandom. Morgan is manipulative, self-centered, resentful and sometimes violent to others, but ultimately, likability is beside the point: he is always understandable. Wearing his enforced femininity like a bloody penance and a sharpened weapon both, he endures constant misgendering from other characters who address him most frequently with she/her pronouns, as people do to forcibly detransitioned, closeted, and non-passing transmasculine youth in real life. The issue at hand is beyond correct pronoun use or passive trans acceptance: after all, Morgan’s serial killer dad accepts Morgan without question.
White’s book churns with such pointed dissonances, periodically interspersed with true crime ephemera and punctuating some of its most disturbing scenes with its most absurd in tonal homage to the tragicomedic American news cycle fixations on violence, sex, and transvestigation. The overbearing parents of an abusive patriarchy and a traitorous bioessentialist feminism are made manifest in Nathaniel and Bellamy, ghoulish stand-ins for a self-perpetuating, punishing gender binary. The reader is provoked, forced to consider if being a man means inevitably being an abuser, or if being a woman must mean forever playing a victim—until you finally end up as one. White asks: is there a way to move between identity lines and discover solidarity, so that deeply inherited systems of gendered violence and privilege might be dismantled?
In the wake of a Supreme Court ruling that permits US schools to now actively discriminate against trans youth using Title IX, White’s book is a critical mirror, a world just like ours, teeming with trans kids clawing their way out. His introductory note is load-bearing, and not just for its many content warnings (graphic violence and torture, child abuse, sexual harassment and assault, grooming, mental health struggles including intrusive thoughts/suicidal ideation, transphobia, ableism, and self-harm). White’s last words in this letter are like a benediction: “I swear: This is a story where the messed-up, spiteful, jagged trans kids make it to end, and have the rest of their lives to get better.” More than once readers will need to remind themselves of White’s message—not because it is a mean-spirited text, but because White is a generous author, who has given us a fully realized, “spiteful, jagged trans kid,” who messes up and lives in terrifying trans technicolor, instead of some stiff pretense of “good representation.”
In the end, this is a forceful and elegant pledge to cherish trans kids whatever hate is ratified by the government or state, to be angry in the right directions, and to remember that: you’re no better.
—Wally McCraith Cornell, Reviewer
Cover illustration from You’re No Better. Text © 2026 by Andrew Joseph White. Jacket art © 2026 by Evangeline Gallagher. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Peachtree Teen.