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Published Mar 2019
400 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
"I've never understood white people who can't admit they're white. I mean, white isn't just a color. And maybe that's the problem for them. White is a passport. It's a ticket."
Five estranged cousins are lost in a maze of their family's tangled secrets. Their grandparents, former potato farmers Gottfried and Marla Hemmings, managed to trade digging spuds for developing subdivisions and now they sit atop a million-dollar bank account—wealth they've refused to pass on to their adult children or their five teenage grandchildren. "Because we want them to thrive," Marla always says.
But for the Hemmings cousins, "thriving" feels a lot like slowly dying of a poison they started taking the moment they were born. As the rot beneath the surface of the Hemmings' white suburban respectability destroys the family from within, the cousins find their ways back to one another, just in time to uncover the terrible cost of maintaining the family name.
With her inimitable surrealism, award winner A.S. King exposes how a toxic culture of polite white supremacy tears a family apart and how one determined generation can dig its way out.
Michael Printz Award, 2020
"[King's] trademark surrealism and trenchant prose will speak profoundly to a generation of young people who are waking up to the societal sins of the past and working toward a more equitable future." - The Horn Book (starred review)
"This visceral examination of humanity's flaws and complexity […] cultivates hope in a younger generation that's wiser and stronger than its predecessors." - Booklist (starred review>
"[P]urely mesmerizing ... the most haunting exploration in youth literature to date of the advantage and poison that is white privilege, and the resentment of young people at the toxicity of what they inherit. King fans know to expect the unexpected, and they'll be richly rewarded with this intricate, heartfelt, readable concoction." - Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books (starred review)
"Sometimes, once you start digging, you find the poisonous parts, but you also find the fruit that will keep you alive."—SLC (starred review)
"This combination of masterly storytelling, memorable characters, and unexpected twists and turns make this book into an unforgettable, lingering read." - School Library Journal (starred review)
"[This] strange and heart-wrenching tale is stunningly original." - Kirkus Reviews
"[P]rofound ... offers hope that at least some of these characters will dig themselves out from under the legacy of hate they have unwillingly inherited." - Publishers Weekly
"This is one of the best written, most memorable young adult novels I've ever read. It's that good." - Richie's Picks
"No apologies necessary. Dig is writing at its finest." - Book and Film Globe
"[T]aut, mesmerizing...The story fearlessly navigates intellectually and emotionally challenging terrain—racism and whiteness, abuse and assault, misogyny, and other violence—as the teens consider and confront painful truths." - Cooperative Children's Book Center
"King's fierce empathy for young people is evident throughout, matched by her gift for a brand of weirdness that somehow manages to capture the intensity, wonder and pain of being alive. Anyone who thinks YA books can't also be great literature needs to read this author."—Irish Times
"There is no other writer like her. She has the power to astonish like a natural wonder. And her books—the raw honesty, beauty, and singular strangeness of them—make me feel less alone in the world." - Martha Brockenbrough, author of The Game of Love and Death
"A.S. King challenges readers from the first page to the last. Dig will make you question the confines of your comfort zone—if you have one. An incredible addition to an already impressive body of work." - Erin Entrada Kelly, New York Times bestselling author and Newbery medalist
This information about Dig was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Krista Schumow Photography
A.S. King has been called "One of the best Y.A. writers working today" by the New York Times Book Review. King is the author of highly-acclaimed novels including her 2016 release Still Life with Tornado, 2015's surrealist I Crawl Through It, Glory O'Brien's History of the Future, Reality Boy, the 2012 Los Angeles Times Book Prize winner Ask the Passengers, Everybody Sees the Ants, 2011 Michael L. Printz Honor Book Please Ignore Vera Dietz among others. She is a faculty member of the Writing for Children and Young Adults MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts and spends many months of the year traveling the country speaking to high school students. After fifteen years living self-sufficiently and teaching literacy to adults in Ireland, she now lives in Pennsylvania.
... Full Biography
Author Interview
Link to A.S. King's Website
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