I'm conflicted in how I feel about this one. I went into it expecting a powerful, painful but necessary read. But after a while, it seems like it turned into trauma porn. Absolutely nothing goes Max's way, and he is stripped of all autonomy in every decision in his life, both due to being "a pushover" who doesn't want to rock his already fragile family and as a "scientific interest." At first, I recognized this as a reflection of his intersexuality and how it didn't feel like it belonged to him, but even after

the characters went, "Gee, maybe we should let Max have control of his own body," after his mother tells the surgeons to proceed with an abortion after Max withdraws his consent, his choices in not wanting to be around his mother anymore and not reporting his rapist to the police or his parents are taken away from him yet again.

I also found the writing itself to be quite bad. The POV shifts are frequent and often unnecessary. Aside from the literal child narrator, who is overly intelligent for his age due to autism (which is never remarked upon by any character), each character has the same narrative voice with almost no distinguishing features. The characters besides Max felt bland and two-dimensional. 

Ultimately, I feel like this is a book with important themes that it misses the mark on.