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Dig by A.S. King
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 simple 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 grand children."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 doublewide. 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 white suburban respectability begins to spread, the far flung grand children gradually find their ways back to each other, just in time to uncover the terrible cost of maintaining the family name.
Review from Booklist Reviews:
With a style and structure similar to I Crawl through It (2015), King's surreal new novel tunnels through the consciousness of five unknowingly connected teens as they grapple with their identities within the context of their families and society. Trauma or abuse touches most of their lives, and they each find security in a self-defined role. The Shoveler's snow shovel may give him a reputation for being strange, but it also keeps him safe from school bullies. The Freak flickers from location to location, always in control of her ability to exit a situation. Malcolm's frequent first-class flights to Jamaica give a charmed veneer to a life otherwise dictated by his father's cancer. Loretta is ringmistress of a flea circus and knows her part by heart, even when her father goes dangerously off script. CanIHelpYou? works the Arby's drive-through, discreetly serving drugs to those who know the magic words. These characters brush against one another's lives, eventually coming together at an eye-opening Easter dinner. King injects the narrative with the topics of racism, white power and privilege, and class with increasing intensity as the teens' stories unfold and entwine. This visceral examination of humanity's flaws and complexity, especially where the adult characters are concerned, nevertheless cultivates hope in a younger generation that's wiser and stronger than its predecessors.
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