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Summary
Summary
A heartbreaking and mindbending story of a talented teenage artist's awakening to the brokenness of her family from critically acclaimed award-winner A.S. King.
Sixteen-year-old Sarah can't draw. This is a problem, because as long as she can remember, she has "done the art." She thinks she's having an existential crisis. And she might be right; she does keep running into past and future versions of herself as she wanders the urban ruins of Philadelphia. Or maybe she's finally waking up to the tornado that is her family, the tornado that six years ago sent her once-beloved older brother flying across the country for a reason she can't quite recall. After decades of staying together "for the kids" and building a family on a foundation of lies and domestic violence, Sarah's parents have reached the end. Now Sarah must come to grips with years spent sleepwalking in the ruins of their toxic marriage. As Sarah herself often observes, nothing about her pain is remotely original--and yet it still hurts.
Insightful, heartbreaking, and ultimately hopeful, this is a vivid portrait of abuse, survival, resurgence that will linger with readers long after the last page.
"Read this book, whatever your age. You may find it's the exact shape and size of the hole in your heart."-- The New York Times
"Surreal and thought-provoking."-- People Magazine
★ "A deeply moving, frank, and compassionate exploration of trauma and resilience, filled to the brim with incisive, grounded wisdom." -- Booklist, starred review
★ "King writes with the confidence of a tightrope walker working without a net."-- Publishers Weekly, starred review
★"[King] blurs reality, truth, violence, emotion, creativity, and art in a show of respect for YA readers."-- Horn Book Magazine, starred review
★ "King's brilliance, artistry, and originality as an author shine through in this thought-provoking work. [...] An unforgettable experience." SLJ, starred review
Author Notes
A. S. (Amy Sarig) King is an award-winning author of both YA and adult fiction. She was born on March 10, 1970, in Reading, PA., and obtained a degree in traditional photography from the Art Institute of Philadelphia.
King wrote her first novel in 1994, but it took her 15 years and more than seven novels to finally get published. Since then, her books have garnered many accolades. Ask the Passengers won the 2012 Los Angeles Times Book Award for Young Adult Literature. Please Ignore Vera Dietz was a 2011 Michael L. Printz Honor Book, an Edgar Award Nominee, a Junior Library Guild selection and a YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults pick. Her first YA novel, The Dust of 100 Dogs, was an ALA Best Book for Young Adults, and a Cybil Award finalist.
Her other titles include: I Crawl Through it, Glory O'Brien's History of the Future, Reality Boy, and Everybody Sees the Ants. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous collections and anthologies, including: Monica Never Shuts up, One Death, Nine stories, Losing It, Break These Rules, and Dear Bully.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
School Library Journal Review
Gr 9-Up-Sixteen-year-old Sarah is a gifted artist, and she may be having an existential crisis, touched off by a situation involving her art teacher and a rigged art show that has left her unable to draw. She has been suppressing the reason her brother left after a family vacation six years ago and the violence and lies that have existed in her family for a very long time. Sarahs from her past and future may just help her figure it all out. Narrator Karissa Vacker gives a nuanced performance to the four Sarahs, from 10-year-old Sarah's bubbly and cheerful personality to 16-year-old Sarah's confusion and anger. Twenty-three-year-old Sarah is just snarky enough, and 40-year-old Sarah shows a certain contentment. Vacker also successfully portrays the tension and violence that exist in Sarah's family. VERDICT Because it requires a certain level of suspension of disbelief and because it deals with the difficult topic of family abuse and violence, this story is not for every listener. However, both the story and its performance are so creative and sensitive that it may become a favorite for those who do listen.-Ann Brownson, Eastern Illinois University, Charleston, SC © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Sarah is 16 and going through an emotional crisis. She is a talented artist but she has stopped creating art, as well as going to school. Instead, she spends her days wandering around Philadelphia, where she literally encounters other versions of herself. She meets 10-year-old Sarah, 23-year-old Sarah, and even 40-year-old Sarah-all of whom try to get her to face traumatic memories and truths that she has been repressing and denying. Voice actor Vacker's first-person narration empathetically conveys all the complexities and nuances of Sarah's emotional state: denial and defensiveness, confusion, fear, anger, and pain. Listeners feel the character struggling to understand her family problems and work out her inner turmoil, while simultaneously trying to avoid doing so by creating a stable facade. Vacker subtly differentiates among the book's characters but doesn't create unique voices for them. For example, she uses a higher pitch to sound childish for 10-year-old Sarah, a deeper, angry pitch for Sarah's father. This production excellently brings to life the novel's portrayal of a teenager struggling to survive and overcome childhood trauma. Ages 14-up. A Dutton hardcover. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Horn Book Review
There is no such thing as an original idea, sixteen-year-old Sarahs teacher tells the class, a dictum that sticks with the once-promising art student. Sarah had an original idea, and she executed it beautifully, but Something Happened at school that sent Sarah reeling. She stopped going to high school (not an original idea, she acknowledges) and instead spends her days roaming around Philadelphia, contemplating changing her name to Umbrella, and following a homeless artist man[who] makes headpieces out of tinfoil. Things get weird when she encounters her own self at age twenty-three at a city bus stop, and later at age ten. Ten-year-old Sarah has a message to relay, something shes trying to get todays Sarah to remember, something about the family trip to Mexico that is fresh in child-Sarahs mind. We already know that Sarahs family is in crisis. Her older brother, Bruce, is long estranged, and her parents marriage has been on the rocks for years. Interspersed with Sarahs unfiltered first-person narration are chapters by Sarahs ER-nurse mom, Helen (in which we learn, for example, that her song for her husband is Youre a Dumb Prick and I Hate You), and flashback chapters set in Mexico in which events are slowly revealed. We also learn, in nonlinear fashion, about what happened to Sarah at school, and why her teachers no original ideas psych-out was even more insidious than it seemed. Lack of original ideas is not something found in work by A.S. King (Everybody Sees the Ants, rev. 1/12; Ask the Passengers, rev. 1/13; I Crawl Through It, rev. 9/15), who blurs reality, truth, violence, emotion, creativity, and art in a show of respect for YA readers. elissa gershowitz September/October 2016 p 110(c) Copyright 2016. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
King, master of troubled protagonists and surreal plots, is at it again. Sarah, 16 and white, has had a breakdown after a series of events she wont immediately reveal: there was whatever she saw with Vicky and Miss Smith, and whatever happened at the art show, and perhaps most importantly, there are the things she has been living with but refusing to know for her entire life, especially since the trip to Mexico six years ago. Sarah quits school, instead searching for meaning by following a homeless artist and befriending 10-year-old Sarah, another version of Sarah who has not yet forgotten what happened in Mexico or why their beloved brother has never visited since. Complex, unreliable narration (by 16-year-old Sarah, with interstitial passages narrated by her mother) brings to life what it means to live in a home where abuse is always threatened but never quite delivered, gradually revealing both the immediate triggers for the existential crisis and the underlying trauma. Sarahs fractured selves (23-year-old and 40-year-old Sarah also make appearances) are both metaphor and magic realism; Sarah has fractured herself when the art that has been her solace becomes another point of tension and uncertainty, but these are not hallucinations. King understands and writes teen anxieties like no other, resulting in difficult, resonant, compelling characters and stories. (Fiction. 14 up) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Sarah stops going to school after her art teacher curtly announces that nothing is truly original, and suddenly artistically talented Sarah can't draw anymore. Now she wanders Philadelphia seeking art and originality, and during her peripatetic truancy, she meets both her 23-year-old and her 10-year-old selves, and what seemed initially to be a trifling problem becomes much, much bigger. King elegantly uses this surrealistic device to convey the complexity of Sarah's emotional growth. When Sarah was 10, she witnessed firsthand her father's seething cruelty, but 16-year-old Sarah has forgotten it, choosing not to look beyond the surface of her parents' strained marriage. But the more 10-year-old Sarah is around, the more 16-year-old Sarah's curiosity about those memories dredges up shreds of the truth. As she approaches the kernel at the heart of her breakdown, 16-year-old Sarah's growing rapport with her past and future selves, as well as with her mother, a fiery night-shift ER nurse, reflects her expanding sense of self and her strength. Sarah's cutting, honest first-person narrative is studded with powerful images, and her restrained tone is a captivating vehicle for her roiling thoughts and feelings. Occasional sections from her mother's perspective offer chilling insight into the damage that abuse, physical and otherwise, leaves behind. A deeply moving, frank, and compassionate exploration of trauma and resilience, filled to the brim with incisive, grounded wisdom.--Hunter, Sarah Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
McLemore's second novel is such a lush, surprising fable, you half expect birds to fly out of its pages. But magic realism is more than special effects. "When the Moon Was Ours" is about identity - the love story of Miel, a girl whose wrist sprouts roses, and Sam, a transgender boy who paints moons and sets the canvases in trees. McLemore uses the supernatural to remind us that the body's need to speak its truth is primal and profound, and that the connection between two people is no more anyone's business than why the dish ran away with the spoon. Sam lives as a boy, inspired by his Pakistani grandmother's stories about the bacha posh custom, in which girls are raised as males to protect sisters - and he fears he will be expected revert to his "correct" gender one day. Miel's fantastical history sparks its own trauma. Still, she cares for him in a label-obliterating way: "It was his body. It was his to name. And he was under this roof of gold and darkness with a girl who would learn to call him whatever he named himself." In an author's note, McLemore talks about her transgender husband, and you realize the novel is a love letter. There's a reason Miel is so moved by Sam's lunar paintings in trees: He's hanging the moon. STILL LIFE WITH TORNADO By A. S. King 295 pp. Dutton, $17.99. (Young adult; ages 14 and up) A 16-year-old girl named Sara hands her art teacher a blank piece of paper and says, "I've lost the will to participate." It's a funny, deadpan moment - but she means it. Sara spends much of King's ninth novel skipping school and wandering around Philadelphia in an existential funk. She rides buses, tails a homeless artist she believes is living an "original" life and considers changing her name to Umbrella. In a beautifully matter-of-fact use of the supernatural that brings Haruki Murakami to mind, Sara also meets herself at the ages of 10, 23 and 40, and circles closer to some stark truths about her family. "Still Life With Tornado" is a moving, unapologetically strange, skillfully constructed novel about how sometimes the most broken home on the block is the one where the parents are still pretending their marriage works. (Spike Jonze should buy the movie rights immediately.) King's insights about parenting, denial and abuse are so raw and true, grown-ups may want to avert their eyes. But she is a witty, humane writer. Sara at 40 is the most well adjusted, so a happy ending always floats just ahead of our heroine, like a firefly. Read this book, whatever your age. You may find it's the exact shape and size of the hole in your heart. SCYTHE By Neal Shusterman 433 pp. Simon & Schuster, $17.99. (Young adult; ages 14 and up) Shusterman, who has written 36 books and won a National Book Award, writes prose with the sort of spring in its step that says: "Stand back. I know what I'm doing." "Scythe" is about a utopia just beginning to unravel. It's the deep future. A cloud computer known as the Thunderhead controls virtually all of mankind's affairs. Scientists have triumphed over disease and even death, and an elite league of reapers has been commissioned to kill to slow population growth. (What could go wrong?) Two teenagers, Citra and Rowan, are drafted as apprentices. Citra learns at the knee of a humane woman named Scythe Curie; Rowan tries not to sell his soul to a renegade psychopath who engineers mass reapings. Only one apprentice can become a scythe, so they're forced to compete horrifically, even as they contend with the capital-F feelings that teenagers in peril always have for one another. Shusterman shuffles his most intriguing character offstage too early, and the novel's dark humor sometimes makes it hard to lose yourself in the romance and peril. Still, "Scythe" is full of sly plot twists and absorbing set pieces. The novel is the first in a planned series, but one emerging theme has a nice sting to it: Maybe we should give computers the keys to what's left of the kingdom, because human beings can't be trusted. A SHADOW BRIGHT AND BURNING By Jessica Cluess 407 pp. Random House, $17.99. (Young adult; ages 14 and up) As secret talents go, Henrietta Howell's is a showstopper: When she gets furious, she bursts into flames. During the course of Cluess's gripping, graceful debut novel, Henrietta will have much to get fiery about. There's the classist, sexist paternalism of early-Victorian-era London; the gall of certain handsome young sorcerer types; and the fact that even though she can't control her powers and has chosen to name her wand Porridge, everyone seems convinced that she alone can defeat the horrifying beings known as the Ancients. Cluess can create an unnerving monster, like R'hlem the Skinless Man, and write a crackling battle scene. But she also swims deep in the thoughts of her heroine, who's simultaneously defiant and unsure of herself. Is it clear that Cluess adores the Harry Potter series and "Jane Eyre"? Yes. So do you. So does everyone. What matters is that her voice is her own. Her missteps are small and few - a slightly chaotic sequence, a sudden left turn concerning one of Henrietta's suitors. "A Shadow Bright and Burning" delivers on the promise of its title. This is a novel that gives off light and heat. LABYRINTH LOST By Zoraida Córdova 324 pp. Sourcebooks Fire. $17.99. (Young adult; ages 14 and up) Alex Mortiz dreads her coming-of-age party because all her relatives are going to be there, including the dead ones. "Labyrinth Lost," which inaugurates Córdova's new fantasy series, is a richly Latin American, giddily exciting novel about a Brooklyn girl navigating two terrifying dominions: a Dante-esque land of shape-shifters called Los Lagos, and adolescence. Alex promises to be a transcendent witch, or bruja, but she believes her magic is tainted and responsible for her father's disappearance. At her party, she renounces her powers with a disastrous spell, whereupon her family vanishes, and she must travel, via portal, to Los Lagos on a rescue mission. Córdova mixes nicely observed details ("Crazy Uncle Julio brought a lonely pink balloon, and it's already started to sag in the corner") with action-movie choreography. And she gives Alex two entirely different love interests: a cocky male mercenary, Nova, and a daring, devoted female friend, Rishi. It's a welcome bit of geometry at a time when bisexual readers are hungering for representation. "Labyrinth Lost" introduces a daunting amount of mythology, and readers may get overwhelmed. There's a line that nails the feeling exactly: "I'm dizzy, but I don't want to leave." THE DIABOLIC By S. J. Kincaid 407 pp. Simon & Schuster, $17.99. (Young adult; ages 14 and up) You start loving Kincaid's second science fiction novel on Page 2 when you learn that its protagonist is named Nemesis, and you love it even more when Nemesis gets a genetically modified dog called Deadly. Nemesis is not "relatable" in the Hollywood sense, which is to say she is not kooky and conflicted. She's a ruthless, predatory lab creation engineered to protect a senator's daughter, Sidonia. The senator outrages the emperor by refusing to kowtow to his backward religion. The emperor strikes back by summoning Sidonia to the royal space station, where he intends to hold her hostage, or worse. The senator's wife decides that Nemesis will impersonate Sidonia instead: "The emperor wishes me to send my innocent little lamb to the slaughter. No. I'll send him my anaconda." Watching Nemesis cut a violent swath through the vile, duplicitous aristocracy is a joy; watching her gradually become "real" and "human," less so. (We don't want Nemesis to be touchy-feely any more than we want the Velveteen Rabbit to be a killing machine.) But the tension is nearly always high, the characters memorable, and the bond between Nemesis and Sidonia genuinely moving. "Diabolic," itself a genetic experiment blending "I, Claudius" and "The Terminator," appeals to both our better and more devious angels. JEFF GILES'S debut Y.A. novel, "The Edge of Everything," will be published in January.