★“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.
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.
