AJW, why must every book of yours need an 8-10 business day recovery window?
You're No Better by Andrew Joseph White is a testament to AJW's growing skill as an author - his body of work just keeps on getting better and better (and darker, too). The novel follows Morgan, an autistic, closeted trans boy navigating an infamous serial killer father and a mother who seemingly just wants to stir up trouble with an invasive documentary about his father's arrest. If you're looking for something that will keep you on the edge of your seat and your heart rate above normal levels, this novel would be perfect for you.
In that classic Andrew Joseph White fashion, the MC is rather abrasive/unlikeable, yet you just can't stop hoping that Morgan gets his happy ending. Personally, I think that character is one of AJW's strongest points, and his character building and resonant (at least for me) portrayal of autism never ceases to amaze me.
The novel is fast-paced, leading to a very quick read - I devoured it in a matter of hours. In the last 100 pages, I felt like I could quite literally not put the book down, as the stakes were just so high.
Overall, this was an amazing novel. Some of my favourite aspects were the complicated portrayals of gender, autism, and mental health, as well as the scathing criticisms of social media and true crime. Honestly, it would not feel right to give You're No Better any less than five/five stars. Highly recommended (as long as you like suspense)
Thank you to Daphne Press for providing this novel for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

AJW never misses for me, but every time he releases a novel, I doubt it can hold up to his previous one. He has proved me completely wrong yet again, and this for me is his best book yet!

Morgan was a fantastic main character, I found him so complex and massively flawed. He was selfish and manipulative yet still so layered that I often found myself hating him and rooting for him at the same time. Being inside the head of a character who can be so cruel at times made for such a satisfying read and I felt myself very invested in Morgan and some of his decisions made me angry and frustrated. However, this is mixed in with an excellent depiction of trauma and the effects it can have on people, which made me feel greatly for Morgan and the balance made him the undoubted hero of the story and so genuinely likeable despite such wrongdoings. The fact that you can like a character like Morgan is a testament to AJW's phenomenal writing and character work.

I found the plot was fast-paced but slowed well for the more emotional and pivotal moments, and the story itself was totally gripping from the very start. I found the twists to be unpredictable and it was fantastic to never really know how you felt about or what to expect from each character the whole way through. I found this truly hard to put down and finished it in a few hours.

This story has AJW's usual brilliant trans and autism rep, and I also found it touched very well on mental health, specifically PTSD, OCD, and intrusive thoughts. Morgan's mental health was explored in depth, and handled with a rawness and grit rarely seen in mental health representation, even in horror. There is no shying away from the uncomfortable and unsightly of mental illness here, and I found myself nodding along at points and really resonating with the darker parts of mental illness which people don't want to talk about.

I also very much enjoyed the criticism and slight parody of true crime fandom. The snippets of social media and blog threads between chapters were often funny but always infuriating. This book explores true crime fanatics and the way they can sometimes treat and speak of killers in a brilliant way.

I will forever and always recommend Andrew Joseph White and, as a trans reader, always appreciate him deeply for the unfiltered and excellent representation he writes.

You’re No Better is a fast-paced gut punch of a thriller, despite being categorized as YA. This book had me in a chokehold from the first chapter. Going into this, I had previously enjoyed Andrew Joseph White’s adult horror novel, You Weren’t Meant to Be Human, but I had not read any of their YA books. I will now be reading the rest of their YA books.

From the beginning, Morgan is a complex protagonist. He is deeply traumatized by his childhood, understandable, and has no issues manipulating people to get what he wants. On the surface, I wouldn’t even say Morgan is a likable protagonist, but something about him had me rooting for him the whole book. Despite the awful things he does and the way he treats his friends, I wanted him to succeed.

You’re No Better is fast-paced, gritty, and complex. It is full of twists and turns that had me flipping pages in desperation to uncover the next piece of the puzzle. Once you start, you won’t be able to put it down.

Andrew Joseph White is back with another incredible novel, and one that takes a deep look into the morbid fascination we as a culture have with true crime. At times, my own curiosity around cases like these felt like a mirror held up to me, forcing me to look beyond the grim details and at the people crimes like this have a lasting impact on.

As a transmasc enby and neurodivergent person, I found myself hugely sympathetic to the struggle of being a boy having to navigate girlhood and keeping up appearances, as well as those thought loops we get stuck on, and the worry that beneath the urge to be a good person, maybe there's something fundamentally broken and flawed underneath. At times Morgan was intensely dislikable, but it all made sense with the life he's lead and the things he's endured, and finding that balance can sometimes be tricky but it was navigated with such ease to create a flawed but interesting main character. I loved Felicity, and Alyssia, and I found myself (for once!) surprised at the twist towards the end.

AJW is an incredible author who is solely responsible for kick-starting my love of queer and trans horror, and I consider each of his novels an instant buy so I was thrilled to be approved for an ARC of You're No Better. Thank you for letting me read this ahead of time - I knew it wouldn't disappoint, and I was absolutely right.

When I read Hell Followed With Us, I said that book would haunt me forever and that I’d pick up everything Andrew Joseph White would write. So yeah, I’ve read all his books. And am still in awe of his writing and the way he can make me feel things.

"Not only are memories imperfect, but they’re malleable. Every time you remember something, it’s like playing a game of telephone with yourself. Things get lost or twisted along the way."

With Compound Fracture, Andrew Joseph White already went in a bit of a different direction, and with You’re No Better, he took yet another path. Because, like another reader already said, You’re No Better is most of all psychological suspense, a genre that’s one of my favorites. And therefore, for me, You’re No Better might be Andrew Joseph White’s best book so far.

Oh, Morgan…

"People are so complex and unpredictable, so alive, and it makes me angry. It’s too much. I’ve never been able to understand it like everyone else."

Some books make goosebumps jump on my skin, like all the time, and You’re No Better is one of them. Morgan is such an unreliable character, and he’s so f*cked up.So much so that I’d be desperate to get back to him the moment I stepped away, and still, I kept hesitating, putting off picking up my e-reader again because I wasn’t ready to go back into his head. This book feels so incredibly real, and as a mom, the horrific way Morgan grew up, with a serial killer father and an insane media-focused mother, cut deep into my soul. At the same time, I needed to be back with Morgan because I wanted to protect him with my life. But I also know he probably wouldn’t have let me…

"I’m scared. I’ve always been scared. I’ve been scared my whole life."

Somehow, I’m always drawn to dark and gritty stories, and this is one of them. Unreliable, lying, manipulating Morgan crept under my skin and wouldn’t let me go. He’ll be occupying my mind for a long time, just like Jude does, a character from C.G. Drews’ You Did Nothing Wrong. I think if you like that book, you’ll love this one too, even though You Did Nothing Wrong is adult and You’re No Better is marketed as YA. With all the themes in You’re No Better, though, this one could easily fit into adult fiction as well, in my opinion.

I've read and loved several of AJW's previous books, and this one is no exception. It's dark, gritty, and messy with severely traumatized main characters portrayed in a way that felt very honest to me. The main character really sucks sometimes but at the same time can you really blame him? I also really loved the portrayal and criticism of true crime in this book.

This book focuses on Morgan, an autistic trans boy whose father was a very notorious serial killer. Morgan was the one who got him caught, but media and true crime creators will not leave him and his family alone. Since Morgan is autistic and tends to have a pretty blank facial expression and has a history of being violent (largely a trauma response, and really only a few instances), there's a lot of speculation that he will be just like his father. Morgan is not actually out as trans, so most people speculation still read him as a girl.

At the start of the book, Morgan's mother is working with a very manipulative film crew to make a true crime documentary about his father, which Morgan is also expected to participate in. Unsurprisingly, this is terrible for his mental state and he starts spiraling even further.

In the mean time, he teams up with classmate Felicity to discover the identity of his father's last victim, which no one ever found out. Felicity is a true crime enthusiast who wants to make their own podcast about the case, and blackmails Morgan with the fact that they know Morgan did not just catch his father with his last victim, but was an active accomplice.

The exploration of trauma in this book was very strong, in particular for Morgan, but also for Felicity. Morgan is very clearly not okay, and his attention seeking mother is obviously making it worse, but what can anyone do in such a situation? I really liked how raw and messy this was, and Morgan felt like a real person who had these things happen to him. Felicity was a really interesting character to, and there are some major twists in regards to their role in the story.

The exploration of true crime here was also very strong. There's many different segments of what people are actually posting on the internet about Morgan's father and the crimes, from extremely gory descriptions of what he actually did (not necessarily described in detail in the book, but more so stated that they do this) to people who are shipping him with different serial killers (this was actually what grossed me out the most but people apparently actually do this???). All these short segments weren't necessarily part of the main plot, but they did a lot to further build up this case and the public views of it. It's also stated that Morgan seeks out any true crime content about his father as an unhealthy coping mechanism, so even if he doesn't engage with all of this on page, he's aware it all exists.

What I also really appreciated was how realistic this book was about serial killers and what they're actually like. They're not super smart geniuses confounding the police. Morgan's father mainly managed to get away with it so long because he's a white man with a good job and the police are super incompetent. He's impulsive, which gets even worse the longer he does it, and does not always hide the evidence well. It's even mentioned that at some point the police caught him with a drugged woman and they let them both go. And like many real life serial killers, Morgan's father is motivated primarily by misogyny.

At its heart, this book is a coming of age book, though coming of age from the perspective of some very damaged teenagers who are unsure they'll ever come of age at all.

Would recommend it to people who enjoyed AJW's previous work, and fans of character centered horror. Do mind the content warnings for this.