Dig

by A.S. King

Winner of the Michael L. Printz Medal

★“King’s narrative concerns are racism, patriarchy, colonialism, white privilege, and the ingrained systems that perpetuate them. . . . [Dig] 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.”—Horn Book, starred review

“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.

• ISBN10: 1432875574
• ISBN13: 9781432875572
• Publish Date: 11 March 2020 (first published 26 March 2019)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Thorndike Striving Reader
• Edition: Large type / large print edition
• Format: Hardcover (Library Binding)
• Language: English

Reviews

[Bianca]

Tradition gets away with lots of shit around here. [...] Tradition. You can say what you want so long as you’re not throwing anvils, I guess. They call it freedom of speech or traditional family values. The louder ones call it heritage—as if it were in our blood to be assholes to other people, as if we’d inherited it. [...] Freedom of speech. Freedom of family values. Even if your family values suck.

A.S. King’s books are always weird, but this one might be the weirdest yet out of all her works I’ve read. But once you get past the weirdness, this one is actually a great read exploring the dangers of family legacies (traditions & values) and how a family’s actions have a ripple effect on the lives of the generations to come.‬ The title, Dig, is a reference to the third-generation kids in the story, who are trying to dig their way out from the horrible values like racism and white supremacy that their family upholds.‬ “This book is supposed to be uncomfortable. I’d apologize, but I’m not sorry,” the author wrote in the acknowledgments. And it really was very fitting.

[Sarah Says]

I finished reading Dig by A.S.King the other day and I still can’t figure out what I want to say about it.

I part hated it (some of the characters are truly disturbing and examples of the worst parts of humanity) and I part loved it (there were three characters I connected with and the last quarter of the book made up for the first three quarters).

It is skillfully written and tackles some dark stuff. I feel like it’s the kind of novel that should be read and dissected in a high school English class. King is a phenomenal writer and isn’t afraid to get dark with it.

The story jumps between six characters, with each short chapter alternating the POV. The jumps never get confusing, it is rest-bite from the not-likable to the likable characters. It created a balance and pushed the story along.

This is not a light read, it tackles: terminal illness, poverty, physical & sexual abuse, parental neglect, racism, white privilege and the danger of family legacy.

Dig is Intense and at times it gets real dark! It’ll make you uncomfortable, and if it doesn’t, there is something wrong with you. But the journey that is reading this book is worth it in the end.

Dig is a story about the way our actions tunnel down and affect those around us, generation after generation. A story about digging our way out from under our past and moving forward to better future.

[Sam@WLABB]

Whenever I pick up an A.S. King book, I expect a story that takes on tough issues without flinching in an originally odd way, and we get that in spades with Dig.

The book was told via The Shoveler, Malcolm, The Freak, Loretta, and CanIHelpYou? - five very different teens, who were connected in some way. Their stories were all imbued with pain and heartbreak, as each was dealing with one or more social ills. Death of a parent, terminal illness, poverty, physical abuse, sexual abuse, neglect, addiction, racism, and white privilege were all explored. So, not a light read, but something that made me uncomfortable, and left me with a lot to think about.

The beauty of any King book is her amazing storytelling. It took me a while to see where this was going, the pieces slowly snapping into place, but WOW! What a payoff. And, I found myself driven by the need to figure out and confirm each and every connection and suspicion.

Though this book was pretty dark and intense, it was somewhat hopeful. The story examined the beliefs of three different "generations". Gottfried and Marla were an older couple. I found Gottfried's crime to be that he was weak and he let his wife destroy their children, while Marla was just sort of horrible altogether. The teens were the most "woke", which showed that with each generation, we were improving are humans, even if we weren't all the way there yet. The teens refused to let the mistakes of their parents color their future, thus giving us hope that each generation will continue to be better than the last.

Overall: This was classic King, in that it was trippy, and the story wonderfully wound around itself as she took on a great many social issues. It was probably the intense book I have read from her to date. It was dark. It was sad. It was meant to make people feel uncomfortable. But, I was left with a glimmer of hope, that if we work hard, we can dig ourselves out from under this legacy.

*ARC provided in exchange for an honest review.

BLOG | INSTAGRAM |TWITTER | BLOGLOVIN | FRIEND ME ON GOODREADS