Family Meal is a novel about queer friendship, loss, finding family, and food, as two childhood friends learn to be around each other as adults. Cam is struggling after the death of his boyfriend, Kai, and is back in his hometown, losing himself in sex and drugs. Meanwhile, TJ, Cam’s childhood best friend whose parents took Cam in, knows Cam is back in town, but they circle one enough, wary after a sense of betrayal. As Cam sees Kai as he goes about his life and TJ looks for what he wants in his future, the two must find their friendship again in a new way.
This is a powerful book, filled with emotions, as well as exploring things like disordered eating and drug abuse. At its heart, it is about family and friendship and the need to find the right people around you, which isn’t just one person, but a whole load of people. It is told from multiple perspectives, mostly Cam’s for the start and TJ’s later on, and this allows the book to explore intimacy in various ways and show the complexity of relationships. Possibly unusually for this kind of book, which isn’t so much focused on a narrative but on characters, the ending did feel like a turning point and a good way to end it. There’s some really compelling side characters as well, that help to show the idea of found family and that human relationships are not simple.
Family Meal is a strange book to describe, with a surprisingly low-key ghost element and a plot that is really centred around friendship and doing things for other people, and a lot of food throughout. Perhaps most notably for me, it leaves you with a sense that not everything has to be fixed by putting it back together the same way.
Fiendfully Reading 
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