By Any Means Necessary

Overview

Torrey has just become the first person in his family to start college, and on his first day in San Francisco, a phone call threatens to undo it. The bee farm his late Uncle Miles left him in Los Angeles is about to be foreclosed on, and Torrey is the only one standing between the bank and the erasure of everything his uncle built.

What follows is a story of double lives: dorm life and new classes against the acreage he and his uncle tended together for years, a tentative new relationship against the pull of old loyalties. Torrey isn't just trying to keep a piece of property; he's trying to keep hold of the person who believed in him before anyone else did.

The novel tracks the toll of that split attention—how a person stretched between two versions of their life starts to lose the thread of both—and asks what it actually means to choose yourself when the people and places that shaped you are the ones asking you to stay.

A Story About Inheritance, Place, and Self-Determination

At its core, this is a coming-of-age novel concerned with what young people owe to the communities and relatives who raised them, versus what they owe to their own futures. Torrey's uncle is the novel's quiet moral center: a man who pushed him toward college while the neighborhood around them offered fewer paths forward. The farm itself becomes a stand-in for that encouragement, something Torrey can't let the bank simply take without a fight, even as fighting for it risks the very opportunity his uncle wanted him to have.

The book also sits in a specific tradition of YA fiction that pairs intimate first-love storylines with weightier questions of class, grief, and belonging. Torrey's new relationship in San Francisco isn't incidental—it's part of how the story explores what it looks like to build an identity away from everything familiar, without discarding it. The tension between L.A. and San Francisco, old self and new self, mirrors a broader question many readers will recognize: whether moving forward requires leaving something, or someone, behind.

Why By Any Means Necessary Has Been Challenged

Reviewers have pointed to the novel's emotional candor—its willingness to sit with grief, financial precarity, and the exhaustion of trying to hold two lives together—as its central strength. That same candor is what draws scrutiny from challengers, who object less to craft than to content: the book depicts a gay teenage protagonist navigating a same-sex relationship, and objectors have raised concerns about its treatment of sexuality and romantic intimacy as inappropriate for school shelves. Some challenges have also cited the book's frank handling of family hardship and loss as too mature for younger readers.

These objections tend to center on whether LGBTQ+ coming-of-age narratives belong in school and library collections at all, rather than on any particular scene or passage. In that sense, the challenges facing this title echo a broader pattern seen across many contested works featuring queer protagonists. The book has been challenged in 1 state and 1 school district within the records tracked by this catalog.