Dig
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Only a generation removed from being Pennsylvania potato farmers, property developers Gottfried and Marla Hemmings now sit atop a seven-figure bank account—wealth they’ve declined to pass on to their adult children or teenage grandchildren.
‘Because we want them to thrive,’ Marla always says. What does thriving look like? Like carrying a snow shovel everywhere. Like selling pot from a fast-food drive-thru window. Like a first-class ticket to Jamaica between cancer treatments. Like a flea circus in a trailer. Like the GPS coordinates to a mound of dirt in a New Jersey forest.
As the rot beneath the surface of the Hemmings’ suburban respectability begins to spread, the far-flung grandchildren gradually find their ways back to one another, just in time to uncover the terrible cost of maintaining the family name. With her inimitable surrealism and insight into the teenage experience, YA master A.S. King explores how a corrosive culture of polite, affluent white supremacy tears a family apart and how one determined generation can save themselves.
A.S. King is the award-winning author of nine acclaimed YA novels. Please Ignore Vera Dietz earned a 2011 Michael L. Printz Honor and Ask the Passengers won the 2013 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. King lives with her family in Pennsylvania, where she returned after a decade in Ireland living off the land and teaching adult literacy.
‘One of the best YA writers working today.’ John Green, author of The Fault in Our Stars
‘Maybe there are writers more adept than King at capturing the outrageous and outraged voice of teenagers, but it’s difficult to think of one.’ New York Times
‘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 medallist
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The family tree under examination in the latest novel by King (Still Life with Tornado) is diseased distorted by racial hatred, drug abuse, poverty, illness, and domestic violence. The patriarch of Pennsylvania's Hemmings family, Gottfried, earned millions selling the family potato farm to housing developers, alienating his siblings. Marla, his mean-spirited wife, enjoys the spoils while looking down at everyone else, including her offspring and grandchildren. "Marla has no idea she's white," observes Malcolm, a grandson, "and the whole world was made for people like her." The first-person narrative shifts perspectives frequently to introduce four other teens, living in the same small town but largely unknown to each other, and their parents, many of whom are, by turns, judgmental, abusive, or neglectful. Like King's other novels, this one has a hallucinatory quality that keeps the reader guessing what's real and what's not. The payoff is in the profound ending, which pulls together the disparate threads and offers hope that at least some of these characters will dig themselves out from under the legacy of hate they have unwillingly inherited. Ages 14 up.)
