Item: Dig
Rating: 4.00
Author: kozbisa

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.

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.

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Dig

by A.S. King

Reviewed by Sam@WLABB on Mar 10, 2019

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