Dig.

2020 Winner of the Michael L. Printz Award

A. S. King is known for stories that defy categorization (save for categorically bowling me over with their brilliance), and Dig. is no exception. Her immersive writing meanders between a handful of teenagers and the retired couple that eventually connects them, like tangled roots climbing back to their source. (That source is a potato. It will make sense later.) Recommended By Madeline S., Powells.com

Acclaimed master of the YA novel A.S. King’s eleventh book is a surreal and searing dive into the tangled secrets of a wealthy white family in suburban Pennsylvania and the terrible cost the family’s children pay to maintain the family name.

The Shoveler, the Freak, CanIHelpYou?, Loretta the Flea-Circus Ring Mistress, and First-Class Malcolm. These are the five teenagers lost in the Hemmings family’s maze of tangled secrets. Only a generation removed from being Pennsylvania potato farmers, Gottfried and Marla Hemmings managed to trade digging spuds for developing subdivisions and now sit atop a seven-figure bank account — wealth they’ve declined to pass on to their adult children or their 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 at the Arby’s drive-thru window. Like a first class ticket to Jamaica between cancer treatments. Like a flea-circus in a double-wide. Like the GPS coordinates to a mound of dirt in a New Jersey forest. As the rot just beneath the surface of the Hemmings’ precious 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 teenage experience, 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.

"[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

"[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)

"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

"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

“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

A.S. King is the critically acclaimed author of many novels for young adults and middle readers, including Still Life with Tornado. Her fiction has earned numerous awards, including an L.A. Times Book Prize, a Printz Honor, and over fifty starred reviews. The New York Times called her “one of the best YA writers working today.” She lives in Pennsylvania with her family.