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Mad Eden: A Novel
From a pathbreaking writer, a thrilling, form-bending novel about a trans healthcare worker whose carefully built life is suddenly imperiled.
Ro and Liam live in a ramshackle cabin in a secluded stretch of Florida. Neither their home nor their sometimes-tumultuous relationship is what the world would call perfect, but to Ro—newly diagnosed with autism and working as a patient navigator for people seeking gender-affirming care—their life, despite the deeply inhospitable political climate, is a kind of paradise.
It's hard to pinpoint exactly what shatters their peace. There’s Quentin, the unpredictable teenager for whom Liam and Ro are quasi-parents, who visits on his way to college, where he plans to finally start T. There’s the appearance of “Mad Eden,” an online fantasy serial about heroic dragon riders that increasingly becomes Ro’s obsession. And then there’s a seemingly innocuous patient video call that results in consequences both unexpected and grave. This triad of circumstances sends Liam's and Ro’s world spinning toward disaster—unless Ro can become the real-life hero their situation demands without betraying who they are and who they love.
With colossal heart and preternatural skill, Morgan Thomas crafts a deliciously destabilizing debut novel that challenges us to confront and reinvent questions of language, sex, prejudice, identity, and the shifting scales of morality. Playing with the possible relationship between autism and time to forge an ingenious new kind of storytelling, Mad Eden imagines, with exhilarating courage, how we might yet joyfully live in a precarious world.
Ro and Liam live in a ramshackle cabin in a secluded stretch of Florida. Neither their home nor their sometimes-tumultuous relationship is what the world would call perfect, but to Ro—newly diagnosed with autism and working as a patient navigator for people seeking gender-affirming care—their life, despite the deeply inhospitable political climate, is a kind of paradise.
It's hard to pinpoint exactly what shatters their peace. There’s Quentin, the unpredictable teenager for whom Liam and Ro are quasi-parents, who visits on his way to college, where he plans to finally start T. There’s the appearance of “Mad Eden,” an online fantasy serial about heroic dragon riders that increasingly becomes Ro’s obsession. And then there’s a seemingly innocuous patient video call that results in consequences both unexpected and grave. This triad of circumstances sends Liam's and Ro’s world spinning toward disaster—unless Ro can become the real-life hero their situation demands without betraying who they are and who they love.
With colossal heart and preternatural skill, Morgan Thomas crafts a deliciously destabilizing debut novel that challenges us to confront and reinvent questions of language, sex, prejudice, identity, and the shifting scales of morality. Playing with the possible relationship between autism and time to forge an ingenious new kind of storytelling, Mad Eden imagines, with exhilarating courage, how we might yet joyfully live in a precarious world.
304 pages, Hardcover
First published June 2, 2026
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December 30, 2025I can’t remember reading a novel so immersive in an aspect of neurodivergent experience. The only other work that comes close is Mel Y. Chen’s Intoxicated: Race, Disability, and Chemical Intimacy across Empire—but that’s theory. An added bonus is an Oulipo-like play with a scientific text transformed into a fantasy story. It also got me thinking about what autie-aesthetics might bring to light (ahem), alongside auti(trans)gender. Now I need to track down Morgan Thomas’s short story collection. My appetite is properly whetted.
June 14, 2026
As a view into perspectives and identities and ways of life and being I know little about experientially, this is an affecting and interesting novel. Was I lost at times, because of the novel’s intellectual and stylistic demands…yes (there’s some awfully high level philosophizing going on here about time, causation, perception and reality, etc.—as well as a dragon-magician narrative I’m still not sure I get). But is there at its heart an engaging and meaningful and emotionally resonant story, and one that is essential to our present time…also yes. This is a novel that is about real people facing real challenges…and it’s important that these voices be known and heard.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Please Do Not Let the Dragon Near the Group Chat, the State Legislature, or the Family Medical Plan
Morgan Thomas’s “Mad Eden” is funny, bruised, and brainy enough to make fantasy, queer domestic farce, and legal terror occupy the same unstable room.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | April 8th, 2026
Beneath pale stone and leaf-filtered light, Ro pauses in the charged stillness where exhaustion, revelation, and the joy’s altered guardianship finally meet.
Morgan Thomas’s “Mad Eden” opens on a splice. A scientific paper becomes a fantasy serial. A client consultation becomes propaganda. A season of grace, pressed hard enough, can be recut as delusion. Thomas makes that splice-work the novel’s governing action. This is a book about trans care, queer domestic life, autistic cognition, anti-trans panic, and the ordinary humiliations of living under legal threat. It is also about joy, though joy here does not behave like a mood one possesses. It behaves like a creature in the house. Running through all of it is the nastier question of what happens when words, memories, bodies, and stories are cut loose from their contexts and made to serve someone else’s need.
Ro lives with their partner Liam in a borrowed cabin in Florida. Little money, no hot water, too much weather, too much precarity. Their life is jury-rigged and tender, held together by routines, jokes, food rules, improvised economies, and a mutual devotion that is never mistaken for ease. Ro works remotely as a patient navigator for a nonprofit helping families access gender-affirming care across hostile state lines. Liam, a translator and writer, is quicker with language, more socially agile, and more willing to treat syntax as both instrument and plaything. Quentin, their quasi-son, moves through the house with the heedless sweetness and real need of a seventeen-year-old who wants parents and has found, instead, an unstable but heartfelt approximation. Then another text takes up residence in the house: “Mad Eden,” an anonymous online fantasy serial Ro discovers just after an autism diagnosis.
With its dragnos, scales, magicians, and islands of proficiency, the serial feels less like escapism than like Ro’s cognition translated into dragon grammar. Ro reads it as theory, erotic text, self-explanation, and covert autobiography all at once. It gives them a way to think about life with Liam as mutualism, asymmetry, protection, shared danger, and bodily co-translation without flattening that life into either romance plot or diagnostic case file. The dragon material stops acting like ornament almost immediately. Alligators, dragnos, friths, islands, maps, and keys are not decorative surplus. They are load-bearing.
The retention pond’s first prophecy: a rust-stained alligator locked with a snake, Florida nature already tipping toward dragon myth and doom.
Then the book is hauled out of domestic privacy and into public circulation. Quentin’s access to testosterone becomes legally precarious. Ro’s work grows riskier. A caller who sounds frightened, ambivalent, and needy is in fact recording and baiting them. The resulting consultation is cut into a grotesquely edited anti-trans hatchet job linked to the online operator Jennifer Flitok and to Gabriella Holt, a lonely, unstable woman who mistakes fixation for intimacy and drags damage behind her. St. Cat, the nonprofit where Ro works, begins buckling under legal fear and board-level panic. Emails arrive. Bomb threats follow. A pizza delivery at the cabin door becomes a tiny masterpiece of menace. Thomas has a pitiless clarity about how little it takes to wrench language free of context and make it swear to its opposite.
Care work under pressure – one lit screen, one exposed figure, and the small domestic room where language begins to harden into danger.
The review-worthy turn is not simply that Ro is defamed. It is that Ro gradually realizes the fantasy serial and the smear campaign share a method. “Mad Eden,” too, is made from language lifted out of an original source and forced into startling new relations. In one case the result is beauty, recognition, refuge, even a new erotic and conceptual vocabulary for being alive. In the other it is slander. The novel knows these acts are not morally equivalent. It also knows they are formal cousins. There is no neutral edit. Form is not where meaning politely resides after the fact. Form is one of the places meaning gets made, bent, and, in bad hands, sharpened into a weapon. The clipped video turns “You’re good to go” into evidence of barbarism. The serial turns autism research into dragon lore, love language, and world-making. Those acts are not the same. They are related. Thomas wants that relation to feel queasy, because it should.
A face cut into pieces and forced to signify against itself – the cold visual logic of bad-faith editing made intimate and brutal.
Without the prose, this whole contraption would shake itself apart. Thomas writes long, recursive, revising sentences, but they do not sag. Sentence by sentence, she keeps the novel breathable. The diction moves with unusual confidence among science, theology, digital chatter, queer house language, legal dread, and a sensory register so reactive it seems to flinch. Ro does not merely remember. They bucket experience. Time does not pass cleanly but thickens, pools, stalls, and sometimes behaves like a hostile landlord. Joy does not brighten a room so much as crouch nearby, purr, cower, lash its tail, and eventually take shape. Thomas is especially good at making abstraction answer to the body. A theory of causality can lead, without strain, to yogurt, menstrual blood, a dead alligator, a badly edited sound file, or the animal-weight comfort of one sleeping body thrown across another. That range keeps the whole machine from rattling into nonsense.
The novel also knows when to loosen its collar. Ro and Liam’s private language – “Henlo,” “Spree,” “Good Ro, best Ro” – keeps the book from hardening into solemnity. These phrases are funny, tender, and a little embarrassing in the way lovers’ real speech so often is. Thomas understands that people in love can sound ridiculous and still mean every syllable. She understands, too, that a phrase cut loose from the scene that made it can become evidence against the speaker. That double knowledge gives the wit its snap. The book is never arch, never trying to look cleverer than its characters, but it has a sly domestic comedy in it: the comedy of routines, of private idioms, of one person’s survival strategy being another person’s bafflement.
Structurally, “Mad Eden” does not advance so much as circle, sidestep, and return. Ro cannot narrate cause and effect in a clean line, and Thomas refuses to clean it up from above. Memory here is not a clothesline but a system of buckets, leaks, reopened containers, stray signals, and delayed recognitions. The embedded installments of “Mad Eden” are the most obvious formal device, but the deeper structural logic lies in adjacency: philosophy beside client call, dragon lore beside state violence, hospital memory beside internet propaganda, bodily panic beside theories of time. Quietly, almost stealthily, the novel retrains the reader’s attention. You stop asking only what happens next. You start asking what has returned beside what, what this scene re-colors, what that image now means in hindsight. At its best, the structure turns interpretation itself into narrative action.
The endnotes matter more than endnotes usually do. They do not simply tidy up after the fiction. They deepen it. They show, almost with mischief, how much of the novel has been built from repurposed sources: autism research, dragon lore, ASL history, theology, animal studies, philosophy of time, song lyrics. I am usually suspicious of visible labor. Labor is not art. Here the visible making matters because it sharpens one’s sense of how carefully Thomas has worked these materials into the grain of the book. The joins have been worked by hand.
What this novel can do, unusually, is imagine joy without sentimentalizing it. Joy here is not reward, innocence, resilience branding, or a gold star for surviving history. It is a temperamental house-beast with its own tastes, aversions, and timing. It pads into a life already crowded with legal threat, financial precarity, ecological unease, bodily dysregulation, suicidal history, and the ordinary indignities of needing things. It does not cancel those conditions. It lives among them. Better still, Thomas never turns joy into a moral halo. Joy makes Ro braver, but it also licenses bad judgment. It sharpens intimacy, but it becomes another thing to interpret, guard, mistrust, and half worship. The book is at its wisest when it distinguishes that season of joy from the later, plainer contentment Ro and Liam reach after joy slips away. Ecstasy visits. Peace has to be built.
It is just as shrewd about intimacy. Ro and Liam are not offered up as saintly queer innocents besieged by the state. They are difficult with one another, asymmetrical, devoted, intermittently cruel, mutually sustaining in ways that are also risky. Liam wants speech, then admits speech was never the point. Ro mistakes one demand for another. They fail to understand each other at exactly the moments when understanding seems most necessary and remain, somehow, each other’s best chance at making a livable world. Thomas never mistakes intimacy for comprehension. One of the loveliest claims in the novel is that mutualism does not require full understanding. That matters for romance, for caretaking, and for the novel’s relation to its reader.
[image error]
At the threshold of departure, Quentin carries more than a duffel: youth, fear, chosen family, and the thin hope of becoming legible elsewhere.
There are costs. The book’s returns to causality, prediction, uncertainty, and interpretation often deepen its pressure, but not always. There are passages where the novel is thinking in real time and passages where it circles a point it has already won. Sleekness would be the wrong virtue here, but congestion is still a risk. Readers who want plot to pull harder than pattern may feel drag. Gabbi, too, though often vivid and painful, occasionally edges close to becoming more useful to the novel’s system than fully free within it. Those are structural costs, not incidental flaws.
The novel never goes out begging to be called timely. Timeliness finds it anyway, the minute a clipped video starts circulating. Thomas has a sharp eye for our edit-happy public culture, for the speed with which digital distortion becomes material threat, and for the way institutions start sacrificing care before the law has even finished commanding them to do so. But the book’s force is not merely topical. What stings is that it understands a deeper difficulty beneath the headlines: how hard it is to act ethically when every explanation is partial, compromised, and ugly in ways that do not stay abstract, when every intervention carries risk, and when every account of what happened can be cut to fit somebody else’s case. Ro’s fear is not only that they have been lied about. It is that they may no longer be able to trust the rules by which they once assured themselves they were good.
Thomas declines the cheap afterglow of a consoling ending. The novel does not restore the earlier joy as a prize for suffering well. It does not pretend that exposure, legal danger, financial damage, institutional cowardice, and moral bewilderment can be redeemed by one clarifying revelation. It chooses something harder and, to my mind, truer. Joy was never a possession. It behaved more like haunting or weather than ownership. What remains once it slips away is not emptiness but a later, leaner mode of living together – less radiant, more durable; less glamorous, more serviceable. In lesser hands the novel would stop at revelation. Thomas goes on to practice.
I’m landing at 92 out of 100, which for Goodreads purposes is 5 stars: not because “Mad Eden” is flawless, but because its best passages are too unhousebroken and too alive to fit a smaller verdict. What keeps needling me after I’ve put it down is not only the book’s anger, though it has earned it, nor even the queasy recognition that art and propaganda can sometimes use disturbingly similar tools. It is the final adjustment of scale. Joy, Thomas suggests, may not be the thing one gets to keep. It may be only the thing that passes through, catches on the path both forward and back, and leaves two people, years later, still close enough to feel where it once lay warm across their laps.
The book’s weather in pigment: ember reds, marsh greens, pale stone, and pressure-dark neutrals arranged as the emotional logic of the series.
Scale, reed, and torn-edge studies testing how the frame itself might carry dragon, wetland, and spliced language without closing the air around them.
Early compositional trials for the church image, feeling out how collapse below and watchfulness above might balance in one field of suspended light.
The church façade, seated figure, tree mass, and perched joy first declared in graphite – structure before atmosphere, threshold before glow.
First washes of pale stone, leaf-shadow, and ember warmth, where the image begins to pass from scaffold into mood.
All watercolor illustrations by Demetris Papadimitropoulos.
Morgan Thomas’s “Mad Eden” is funny, bruised, and brainy enough to make fantasy, queer domestic farce, and legal terror occupy the same unstable room.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | April 8th, 2026
Beneath pale stone and leaf-filtered light, Ro pauses in the charged stillness where exhaustion, revelation, and the joy’s altered guardianship finally meet.
Morgan Thomas’s “Mad Eden” opens on a splice. A scientific paper becomes a fantasy serial. A client consultation becomes propaganda. A season of grace, pressed hard enough, can be recut as delusion. Thomas makes that splice-work the novel’s governing action. This is a book about trans care, queer domestic life, autistic cognition, anti-trans panic, and the ordinary humiliations of living under legal threat. It is also about joy, though joy here does not behave like a mood one possesses. It behaves like a creature in the house. Running through all of it is the nastier question of what happens when words, memories, bodies, and stories are cut loose from their contexts and made to serve someone else’s need.
Ro lives with their partner Liam in a borrowed cabin in Florida. Little money, no hot water, too much weather, too much precarity. Their life is jury-rigged and tender, held together by routines, jokes, food rules, improvised economies, and a mutual devotion that is never mistaken for ease. Ro works remotely as a patient navigator for a nonprofit helping families access gender-affirming care across hostile state lines. Liam, a translator and writer, is quicker with language, more socially agile, and more willing to treat syntax as both instrument and plaything. Quentin, their quasi-son, moves through the house with the heedless sweetness and real need of a seventeen-year-old who wants parents and has found, instead, an unstable but heartfelt approximation. Then another text takes up residence in the house: “Mad Eden,” an anonymous online fantasy serial Ro discovers just after an autism diagnosis.
With its dragnos, scales, magicians, and islands of proficiency, the serial feels less like escapism than like Ro’s cognition translated into dragon grammar. Ro reads it as theory, erotic text, self-explanation, and covert autobiography all at once. It gives them a way to think about life with Liam as mutualism, asymmetry, protection, shared danger, and bodily co-translation without flattening that life into either romance plot or diagnostic case file. The dragon material stops acting like ornament almost immediately. Alligators, dragnos, friths, islands, maps, and keys are not decorative surplus. They are load-bearing.
The retention pond’s first prophecy: a rust-stained alligator locked with a snake, Florida nature already tipping toward dragon myth and doom.
Then the book is hauled out of domestic privacy and into public circulation. Quentin’s access to testosterone becomes legally precarious. Ro’s work grows riskier. A caller who sounds frightened, ambivalent, and needy is in fact recording and baiting them. The resulting consultation is cut into a grotesquely edited anti-trans hatchet job linked to the online operator Jennifer Flitok and to Gabriella Holt, a lonely, unstable woman who mistakes fixation for intimacy and drags damage behind her. St. Cat, the nonprofit where Ro works, begins buckling under legal fear and board-level panic. Emails arrive. Bomb threats follow. A pizza delivery at the cabin door becomes a tiny masterpiece of menace. Thomas has a pitiless clarity about how little it takes to wrench language free of context and make it swear to its opposite.
Care work under pressure – one lit screen, one exposed figure, and the small domestic room where language begins to harden into danger.
The review-worthy turn is not simply that Ro is defamed. It is that Ro gradually realizes the fantasy serial and the smear campaign share a method. “Mad Eden,” too, is made from language lifted out of an original source and forced into startling new relations. In one case the result is beauty, recognition, refuge, even a new erotic and conceptual vocabulary for being alive. In the other it is slander. The novel knows these acts are not morally equivalent. It also knows they are formal cousins. There is no neutral edit. Form is not where meaning politely resides after the fact. Form is one of the places meaning gets made, bent, and, in bad hands, sharpened into a weapon. The clipped video turns “You’re good to go” into evidence of barbarism. The serial turns autism research into dragon lore, love language, and world-making. Those acts are not the same. They are related. Thomas wants that relation to feel queasy, because it should.
A face cut into pieces and forced to signify against itself – the cold visual logic of bad-faith editing made intimate and brutal.
Without the prose, this whole contraption would shake itself apart. Thomas writes long, recursive, revising sentences, but they do not sag. Sentence by sentence, she keeps the novel breathable. The diction moves with unusual confidence among science, theology, digital chatter, queer house language, legal dread, and a sensory register so reactive it seems to flinch. Ro does not merely remember. They bucket experience. Time does not pass cleanly but thickens, pools, stalls, and sometimes behaves like a hostile landlord. Joy does not brighten a room so much as crouch nearby, purr, cower, lash its tail, and eventually take shape. Thomas is especially good at making abstraction answer to the body. A theory of causality can lead, without strain, to yogurt, menstrual blood, a dead alligator, a badly edited sound file, or the animal-weight comfort of one sleeping body thrown across another. That range keeps the whole machine from rattling into nonsense.
The novel also knows when to loosen its collar. Ro and Liam’s private language – “Henlo,” “Spree,” “Good Ro, best Ro” – keeps the book from hardening into solemnity. These phrases are funny, tender, and a little embarrassing in the way lovers’ real speech so often is. Thomas understands that people in love can sound ridiculous and still mean every syllable. She understands, too, that a phrase cut loose from the scene that made it can become evidence against the speaker. That double knowledge gives the wit its snap. The book is never arch, never trying to look cleverer than its characters, but it has a sly domestic comedy in it: the comedy of routines, of private idioms, of one person’s survival strategy being another person’s bafflement.
Structurally, “Mad Eden” does not advance so much as circle, sidestep, and return. Ro cannot narrate cause and effect in a clean line, and Thomas refuses to clean it up from above. Memory here is not a clothesline but a system of buckets, leaks, reopened containers, stray signals, and delayed recognitions. The embedded installments of “Mad Eden” are the most obvious formal device, but the deeper structural logic lies in adjacency: philosophy beside client call, dragon lore beside state violence, hospital memory beside internet propaganda, bodily panic beside theories of time. Quietly, almost stealthily, the novel retrains the reader’s attention. You stop asking only what happens next. You start asking what has returned beside what, what this scene re-colors, what that image now means in hindsight. At its best, the structure turns interpretation itself into narrative action.
The endnotes matter more than endnotes usually do. They do not simply tidy up after the fiction. They deepen it. They show, almost with mischief, how much of the novel has been built from repurposed sources: autism research, dragon lore, ASL history, theology, animal studies, philosophy of time, song lyrics. I am usually suspicious of visible labor. Labor is not art. Here the visible making matters because it sharpens one’s sense of how carefully Thomas has worked these materials into the grain of the book. The joins have been worked by hand.
What this novel can do, unusually, is imagine joy without sentimentalizing it. Joy here is not reward, innocence, resilience branding, or a gold star for surviving history. It is a temperamental house-beast with its own tastes, aversions, and timing. It pads into a life already crowded with legal threat, financial precarity, ecological unease, bodily dysregulation, suicidal history, and the ordinary indignities of needing things. It does not cancel those conditions. It lives among them. Better still, Thomas never turns joy into a moral halo. Joy makes Ro braver, but it also licenses bad judgment. It sharpens intimacy, but it becomes another thing to interpret, guard, mistrust, and half worship. The book is at its wisest when it distinguishes that season of joy from the later, plainer contentment Ro and Liam reach after joy slips away. Ecstasy visits. Peace has to be built.
It is just as shrewd about intimacy. Ro and Liam are not offered up as saintly queer innocents besieged by the state. They are difficult with one another, asymmetrical, devoted, intermittently cruel, mutually sustaining in ways that are also risky. Liam wants speech, then admits speech was never the point. Ro mistakes one demand for another. They fail to understand each other at exactly the moments when understanding seems most necessary and remain, somehow, each other’s best chance at making a livable world. Thomas never mistakes intimacy for comprehension. One of the loveliest claims in the novel is that mutualism does not require full understanding. That matters for romance, for caretaking, and for the novel’s relation to its reader.
[image error]
At the threshold of departure, Quentin carries more than a duffel: youth, fear, chosen family, and the thin hope of becoming legible elsewhere.
There are costs. The book’s returns to causality, prediction, uncertainty, and interpretation often deepen its pressure, but not always. There are passages where the novel is thinking in real time and passages where it circles a point it has already won. Sleekness would be the wrong virtue here, but congestion is still a risk. Readers who want plot to pull harder than pattern may feel drag. Gabbi, too, though often vivid and painful, occasionally edges close to becoming more useful to the novel’s system than fully free within it. Those are structural costs, not incidental flaws.
The novel never goes out begging to be called timely. Timeliness finds it anyway, the minute a clipped video starts circulating. Thomas has a sharp eye for our edit-happy public culture, for the speed with which digital distortion becomes material threat, and for the way institutions start sacrificing care before the law has even finished commanding them to do so. But the book’s force is not merely topical. What stings is that it understands a deeper difficulty beneath the headlines: how hard it is to act ethically when every explanation is partial, compromised, and ugly in ways that do not stay abstract, when every intervention carries risk, and when every account of what happened can be cut to fit somebody else’s case. Ro’s fear is not only that they have been lied about. It is that they may no longer be able to trust the rules by which they once assured themselves they were good.
Thomas declines the cheap afterglow of a consoling ending. The novel does not restore the earlier joy as a prize for suffering well. It does not pretend that exposure, legal danger, financial damage, institutional cowardice, and moral bewilderment can be redeemed by one clarifying revelation. It chooses something harder and, to my mind, truer. Joy was never a possession. It behaved more like haunting or weather than ownership. What remains once it slips away is not emptiness but a later, leaner mode of living together – less radiant, more durable; less glamorous, more serviceable. In lesser hands the novel would stop at revelation. Thomas goes on to practice.
I’m landing at 92 out of 100, which for Goodreads purposes is 5 stars: not because “Mad Eden” is flawless, but because its best passages are too unhousebroken and too alive to fit a smaller verdict. What keeps needling me after I’ve put it down is not only the book’s anger, though it has earned it, nor even the queasy recognition that art and propaganda can sometimes use disturbingly similar tools. It is the final adjustment of scale. Joy, Thomas suggests, may not be the thing one gets to keep. It may be only the thing that passes through, catches on the path both forward and back, and leaves two people, years later, still close enough to feel where it once lay warm across their laps.
The book’s weather in pigment: ember reds, marsh greens, pale stone, and pressure-dark neutrals arranged as the emotional logic of the series.
Scale, reed, and torn-edge studies testing how the frame itself might carry dragon, wetland, and spliced language without closing the air around them.
Early compositional trials for the church image, feeling out how collapse below and watchfulness above might balance in one field of suspended light.
The church façade, seated figure, tree mass, and perched joy first declared in graphite – structure before atmosphere, threshold before glow.
First washes of pale stone, leaf-shadow, and ember warmth, where the image begins to pass from scaffold into mood.
All watercolor illustrations by Demetris Papadimitropoulos.
June 5, 2026
Real Rating: 4.5* of five
The Publisher Says: From a pathbreaking writer, a thrilling, form-bending novel about a trans healthcare worker whose carefully built life is suddenly imperiled.
Ro and Liam live in a ramshackle cabin in a secluded stretch of Florida. Neither their home nor their sometimes-tumultuous relationship is what the world would call perfect, but to Ro—newly diagnosed with autism and working as a patient navigator for people seeking gender-affirming care—their life, despite the deeply inhospitable political climate, is a kind of paradise.
It's hard to pinpoint exactly what shatters their peace. There’s Quentin, the unpredictable teenager for whom Liam and Ro are quasi-parents, who visits on his way to college, where he plans to finally start T. There’s the appearance of “Mad Eden,” an online fantasy serial about heroic dragon riders that increasingly becomes Ro’s obsession. And then there’s a seemingly innocuous patient video call that results in consequences both unexpected and grave. This triad of circumstances sends Liam's and Ro’s world spinning toward disaster—unless Ro can become the real-life hero their situation demands without betraying who they are and who they love.
With colossal heart and preternatural skill, Morgan Thomas crafts a deliciously destabilizing debut novel that challenges us to confront and reinvent questions of language, sex, prejudice, identity, and the shifting scales of morality. Playing with the possible relationship between autism and time to forge an ingenious new kind of storytelling, Mad Eden imagines, with exhilarating courage, how we might yet joyfully live in a precarious world.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: "Intersectionality" is a buzzword, it's true; the idea behind a person having intersecting identities has always seemed self-evident to me, so I'm been a bit eye-rolly in my response to its polysyllabifactive neologization.
Whatever, old man, what's your point?
The intersectionality of Ro's adult-diagnosed autism and Ro's trans identity would never have been used in a mainstream, high-budget novel in my youth. It would have lurked in the bottom-of-the-midlist pity-porn area of publishing throughout the entirety of the twentieth century. (Leave aside autism's hideous, abusive history for now, it's not relevant in this context. Let's just be delighted that it is not the case anymore.)
And Author Thomas would have been deprived of their métier. To all our great loss. (Singular "they" is neither error nor solecism.) To make this exploration of human...grunginess, messiness, animal-function reality...there had to be a generation of writers pushing pushing pushing against the polite prudery of nice people who act like they've never smelled, let alone touched, an asshole. If you've changed a diaper, cleaned yourself after a shit, cleaned up after your pet, yes you have. Many a nose is wrinkling now. Maybe this read is not for you, because it's very forthright in its body-ness. I think all y'all ought to unpucker and stop with the fakeness of pretending you're shocked, shocked! to find there's animal reality to beings living their life.
I suspect it will cause some people to re-evaluate their transphobia, however mild it may be, to realize that it's rooted in a concept of body-ness that belongs to a bygone era. Much like "eww-ick" homophobia, the reality of the twenty-first century is we can fix.clean/care for many, many things that killed people in older times. Keep up! Plug in! Grow some empathy for others' needs and wants, if you expect to go unchallenged in your perception of yourself as a good person.
Ro, the autistic trans guide through the deliberately desgined to be complex medical system that enriches many corporations and immiserates and impoverishes millions who live in the US, uses their autism to guide those in need through a labyrinth. Think, in this case, of the original Labyrinth and its intended function: a prison to hold a monstrous being created out of mismatched partners' uncontrollable, animal (!) passion. Is this making sense now? Ro is less Theseus, more Ariadne. A humane person, one caring for the welfare of others, helping them finr ways through the unforgiving maze, not always a "monster"-slaying self-righteous prick.
I don't offer a perfect five stars because I was less convinced by the "Mad Eden" text that Ro becomes obsessed with being all that worthy of their obsession. I was also more interested in leaning more about Ro, their partner Liam, and the couple's found-family child Quentin in relationship than I was in "Mad Eden." So, purely on personal-enjoyment grounds, I've got to go with a solid four-and-a-half stars for this rich, enriching, selfness-nourishing tale of one person's choice to use their lifee to help others find their own true selves.
The Publisher Says: From a pathbreaking writer, a thrilling, form-bending novel about a trans healthcare worker whose carefully built life is suddenly imperiled.
Ro and Liam live in a ramshackle cabin in a secluded stretch of Florida. Neither their home nor their sometimes-tumultuous relationship is what the world would call perfect, but to Ro—newly diagnosed with autism and working as a patient navigator for people seeking gender-affirming care—their life, despite the deeply inhospitable political climate, is a kind of paradise.
It's hard to pinpoint exactly what shatters their peace. There’s Quentin, the unpredictable teenager for whom Liam and Ro are quasi-parents, who visits on his way to college, where he plans to finally start T. There’s the appearance of “Mad Eden,” an online fantasy serial about heroic dragon riders that increasingly becomes Ro’s obsession. And then there’s a seemingly innocuous patient video call that results in consequences both unexpected and grave. This triad of circumstances sends Liam's and Ro’s world spinning toward disaster—unless Ro can become the real-life hero their situation demands without betraying who they are and who they love.
With colossal heart and preternatural skill, Morgan Thomas crafts a deliciously destabilizing debut novel that challenges us to confront and reinvent questions of language, sex, prejudice, identity, and the shifting scales of morality. Playing with the possible relationship between autism and time to forge an ingenious new kind of storytelling, Mad Eden imagines, with exhilarating courage, how we might yet joyfully live in a precarious world.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: "Intersectionality" is a buzzword, it's true; the idea behind a person having intersecting identities has always seemed self-evident to me, so I'm been a bit eye-rolly in my response to its polysyllabifactive neologization.
Whatever, old man, what's your point?
The intersectionality of Ro's adult-diagnosed autism and Ro's trans identity would never have been used in a mainstream, high-budget novel in my youth. It would have lurked in the bottom-of-the-midlist pity-porn area of publishing throughout the entirety of the twentieth century. (Leave aside autism's hideous, abusive history for now, it's not relevant in this context. Let's just be delighted that it is not the case anymore.)
And Author Thomas would have been deprived of their métier. To all our great loss. (Singular "they" is neither error nor solecism.) To make this exploration of human...grunginess, messiness, animal-function reality...there had to be a generation of writers pushing pushing pushing against the polite prudery of nice people who act like they've never smelled, let alone touched, an asshole. If you've changed a diaper, cleaned yourself after a shit, cleaned up after your pet, yes you have. Many a nose is wrinkling now. Maybe this read is not for you, because it's very forthright in its body-ness. I think all y'all ought to unpucker and stop with the fakeness of pretending you're shocked, shocked! to find there's animal reality to beings living their life.
I suspect it will cause some people to re-evaluate their transphobia, however mild it may be, to realize that it's rooted in a concept of body-ness that belongs to a bygone era. Much like "eww-ick" homophobia, the reality of the twenty-first century is we can fix.clean/care for many, many things that killed people in older times. Keep up! Plug in! Grow some empathy for others' needs and wants, if you expect to go unchallenged in your perception of yourself as a good person.
Ro, the autistic trans guide through the deliberately desgined to be complex medical system that enriches many corporations and immiserates and impoverishes millions who live in the US, uses their autism to guide those in need through a labyrinth. Think, in this case, of the original Labyrinth and its intended function: a prison to hold a monstrous being created out of mismatched partners' uncontrollable, animal (!) passion. Is this making sense now? Ro is less Theseus, more Ariadne. A humane person, one caring for the welfare of others, helping them finr ways through the unforgiving maze, not always a "monster"-slaying self-righteous prick.
I don't offer a perfect five stars because I was less convinced by the "Mad Eden" text that Ro becomes obsessed with being all that worthy of their obsession. I was also more interested in leaning more about Ro, their partner Liam, and the couple's found-family child Quentin in relationship than I was in "Mad Eden." So, purely on personal-enjoyment grounds, I've got to go with a solid four-and-a-half stars for this rich, enriching, selfness-nourishing tale of one person's choice to use their lifee to help others find their own true selves.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
4 stars
This book is described as "thrilling" and "form-bending," and this is an apt perspective. I've not read anything quite like this, and I mean that in the very best way, and I really enjoyed how the intersections of form and genre matched the intersections of identity here. There is so much to dig into throughout this book.
Ro is trans and has - as an adult - just been diagnosed autistic, and this was a great example of a book hitting me at just the right time. It's Autism Acceptance month, and I think I've been to five different related trainings at work in the last two weeks! Even if you don't have the supplemental PD happening in your real-life orbit, you'll still get a TON out of the way Thomas writes Ro, especially. I really enjoyed the representation of distinct trans experiences and Ro's experience as an autistic person. Of course, part of that includes people's gross and weird reactions, and while I don't at all enjoy those elements of our lived experience, I did find the insidiousness of other people both terrifying and markedly realistic here.
And the way Mad Eden comes in? Superb. This is just an extremely inventive and unique way to match motifs and messaging.
I knew I really enjoyed this as soon as I finished it, but some of the content is really tough, and that makes it harder to really process on the spot. The more I sit with it, the more I appreciate the experience. This is my first encounter with this author, but I'm already actively seeking more points of access and will absolutely be on the lookout for new content, too!
*Special thanks to NetGalley and MCD for this arc, which I received in exchange for an honest review. The opinions expressed here are my own.
This book is described as "thrilling" and "form-bending," and this is an apt perspective. I've not read anything quite like this, and I mean that in the very best way, and I really enjoyed how the intersections of form and genre matched the intersections of identity here. There is so much to dig into throughout this book.
Ro is trans and has - as an adult - just been diagnosed autistic, and this was a great example of a book hitting me at just the right time. It's Autism Acceptance month, and I think I've been to five different related trainings at work in the last two weeks! Even if you don't have the supplemental PD happening in your real-life orbit, you'll still get a TON out of the way Thomas writes Ro, especially. I really enjoyed the representation of distinct trans experiences and Ro's experience as an autistic person. Of course, part of that includes people's gross and weird reactions, and while I don't at all enjoy those elements of our lived experience, I did find the insidiousness of other people both terrifying and markedly realistic here.
And the way Mad Eden comes in? Superb. This is just an extremely inventive and unique way to match motifs and messaging.
I knew I really enjoyed this as soon as I finished it, but some of the content is really tough, and that makes it harder to really process on the spot. The more I sit with it, the more I appreciate the experience. This is my first encounter with this author, but I'm already actively seeking more points of access and will absolutely be on the lookout for new content, too!
*Special thanks to NetGalley and MCD for this arc, which I received in exchange for an honest review. The opinions expressed here are my own.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
I got to 40% but simply could not continue reading. The premise of this novel really drew me in but I struggled to follow the narration and in particular found the sections on Mad Eden confusing and hard to get through.
What I did really enjoy was Ro's descriptions of their interactions with others and the observations on how their neurodivergence affects those interactions and changes them. I did struggle a little to believe that Ro was only recently diagnosed as autistic as the way they described their own patterns of behaviour seemed to me to be on the more noticeable scale and it didn't feel as though Ro was very good at masking. Ro's work also intrigued me; not being from the US I don't understand the nuances of how cross-state healthcare can sometimes work to provide the care needed for trans and nonbinary patients. I appreciated Ro's detailed explanations via her conversations with "clients" and saw how Ro's neurodivergence was actually perhaps an asset in the particular role they fulfilled in that they were able to be clear with those they spoke to about what options were and were not possible without beating around the bush.
I think what lost me was the longwinded passages about the Mad Eden text which Ro had recently become obsessed with. The idea that the text was written using only vocabulary from a scientific publication on autism was interesting but it made it all quite nonsensical to me and the excerpts were too short for me to understand what it was about the story that so gripped Ro.
Thanks to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the ARC. All opinions are my own.
What I did really enjoy was Ro's descriptions of their interactions with others and the observations on how their neurodivergence affects those interactions and changes them. I did struggle a little to believe that Ro was only recently diagnosed as autistic as the way they described their own patterns of behaviour seemed to me to be on the more noticeable scale and it didn't feel as though Ro was very good at masking. Ro's work also intrigued me; not being from the US I don't understand the nuances of how cross-state healthcare can sometimes work to provide the care needed for trans and nonbinary patients. I appreciated Ro's detailed explanations via her conversations with "clients" and saw how Ro's neurodivergence was actually perhaps an asset in the particular role they fulfilled in that they were able to be clear with those they spoke to about what options were and were not possible without beating around the bush.
I think what lost me was the longwinded passages about the Mad Eden text which Ro had recently become obsessed with. The idea that the text was written using only vocabulary from a scientific publication on autism was interesting but it made it all quite nonsensical to me and the excerpts were too short for me to understand what it was about the story that so gripped Ro.
Thanks to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the ARC. All opinions are my own.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Mad Eden is a novel about queer neurodivergent experience, the current realities of being trans in the US, and the potential for the fluidity of form and time. Ro is trans, has been newly diagnosed with autism, and works as a patient navigator for gender affirming healthcare, all whilst living in a cabin in Florida with partner Liam. Ro and Liam's world isn't always stable, especially not as they have become quasi-parents to trans teen Quentin, but it is thrown into further flux thanks to an online text, "Mad Eden", that Ro becomes obsessed with, and a call with a patient of Ro's that turns sinister.
This is a fascinating book that uses the concept of the academic paper turned fantasy story as a framework for imagining not only autism, but also relationships, self, and language. At the same time, it is a very real story about the threats facing trans healthcare in the US and anyone who advocates for it. Parts of the book can be painful to read, feeling so real to what people you know or have heard about have faced, but then the book also plays with frameworks and questions the kinds of stories we tell or don't.
If you like books that ask questions of form and if we need new or transformed forms to express specific ways of experiencing the world, then Mad Eden offers a chance to look at these ideas through a trans, autistic lens, whilst also confronting what it means to be trans and autistic in contemporary America.
This is a fascinating book that uses the concept of the academic paper turned fantasy story as a framework for imagining not only autism, but also relationships, self, and language. At the same time, it is a very real story about the threats facing trans healthcare in the US and anyone who advocates for it. Parts of the book can be painful to read, feeling so real to what people you know or have heard about have faced, but then the book also plays with frameworks and questions the kinds of stories we tell or don't.
If you like books that ask questions of form and if we need new or transformed forms to express specific ways of experiencing the world, then Mad Eden offers a chance to look at these ideas through a trans, autistic lens, whilst also confronting what it means to be trans and autistic in contemporary America.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
This is a really interesting and unique book exploring gender and neurodivergence (and Southern identity, shoutout) in a way I've never quite encountered before. It is very successful in putting me in the mind of the narrator, and exploring the complexities of how this autistic protagonist moves through and makes sense of the world. It also does this without being patronising or over romanticising (or GOD forbid quirky-ifying) of the autistic experience. I imagine for an autistic reader this would be incredibly affirming and for me as a non-autistic person it made for an enlightening, engaging and emotional read. It's also a frustrating experience, not shying away from the challenging, painful effects that come of being trans and autistic in the U.S. Very messy and intelligent and strange in the best ways. I don't really fuck with dragons or reddit like that but would be even more massive if I did.
December 22, 2025
A novel that exists in the intersectional space created by neurodivergence and queerness, that explores the dangerous effects of halting gender affirming care and the post (zip) code lottery created by local decision making on healthcare. The novel wasn't what I expected from the description, but it was so much more than I expected. It's hard to say what the novel is ultimately about, as I think that might be something each reader will have to decide for themselves. Nonetheless, a significant theme for me was the search for peace and joy, through a relationship, which only has to work for those within it and how a mutually sustaining relationship of love and understanding can be nurtured in spite of one's difference from mainstream society.
I enjoyed this novel in the form of an eARC thanks to NetGalley, but leave this honest review freely.
I enjoyed this novel in the form of an eARC thanks to NetGalley, but leave this honest review freely.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
an infinitely recognizable antidote to frictionless comfort reading. thank you thank you thank you.
Mad Eden is a neuroqueer earthquake, a destabilizing, ecstatic, violent, breathtaking novel that inhabits every corner of its characters and our screwed up world. our ugly politics. our bigotries. our loneliness. our bodies. our miscommunications. our love. our ineffable thing that hasn't died yet. It kept looking back at me. I kept seeing too clearly when I looked at it.
it is furiously odd and fully embodied, and i loved it, and it upset me many times. how do you feel desolate and welcomed at the same time?
please read it.
Mad Eden is a neuroqueer earthquake, a destabilizing, ecstatic, violent, breathtaking novel that inhabits every corner of its characters and our screwed up world. our ugly politics. our bigotries. our loneliness. our bodies. our miscommunications. our love. our ineffable thing that hasn't died yet. It kept looking back at me. I kept seeing too clearly when I looked at it.
it is furiously odd and fully embodied, and i loved it, and it upset me many times. how do you feel desolate and welcomed at the same time?
please read it.
Review of advance copy
Buy it and read it. It’s amazing.
Mad Eden is a dazzling novel of queer and autistic survival, where diagnosis becomes myth and politics turn intimate. It refuses binaries, choosing reverberation over resolution. What lingers is creation itself—the low, insistent hum of a book that shouldn’t call itself a masterpiece, but unmistakably is.
Mad Eden is a dazzling novel of queer and autistic survival, where diagnosis becomes myth and politics turn intimate. It refuses binaries, choosing reverberation over resolution. What lingers is creation itself—the low, insistent hum of a book that shouldn’t call itself a masterpiece, but unmistakably is.
April 16, 2026
A novel that if it vibes with you, will extremely vibe with you. We get a story about a trans femme phone care coordinator in Florida hyperfixating on a novel coming out in installments online that is a continuation of a series from her childhood as the world starts to unravel around her. You know when this is taking place, even though it feels like a car fire you're driving slowly past on the highway. I felt the line "I follow the rules to make me good" deeply in my bones, to the point that I can't describe it accurately, though I'll be damned if I don't at least try. Definitely an author I'll be watching in the future.
June 11, 2026
Thanks for the ARC!
Honestly loved this one, intimate and fresh. I found myself wanting to know more about the characters and what was happening or would happen to them. Feels like we could use more works with characters like this.
Honestly loved this one, intimate and fresh. I found myself wanting to know more about the characters and what was happening or would happen to them. Feels like we could use more works with characters like this.
tbr-arc
October 31, 2025i feel like this could be beautiful and magical.
*thank you to MCD for the ARC*
*thank you to MCD for the ARC*
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
I did not finish this book. Others might really enjoy this writing style, but I found it hard to read, as it was too descriptive for me to follow.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
3.5 stars. Mad Eden was written from the perspective of Ro, a neurodivergent person who works in gender-affirming healthcare. The book brought clarity into the lived experiences of those who have to deal with the difficulties of finding gender affirming care in the US, specifically given the political climate there. The ups and downs with Ro and Liam's relationship as they worked to understand and compromise with each other were my favorite parts - mutualism was a major theme. The writing was sharp in areas but felt cloudy in others, which made a few chapters drag, but was clear the author was well-versed in the subject matter and I appreciated that there were resources/references included at the end of the book.
Thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the advanced copy!
Thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the advanced copy!
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