I am so glad that Bird Cramer decided to contribute to Dr. Bickmore's YA Wednesday. I am especially happy that she has decided to focus on A.S. King. I have admired King's work for a long time. I think she is a remarkable writer. Over the years, I have selected several of King's books as weekend picks and have written briefly about her work. Bird provides an excellent overview of her work with a strong rationale for the value of King's books in our classrooms and in the lives of adolescents.
I claim that not only is A.S. King one of the best writers of YA fiction, she is one of the best living writers--period. When I read the first two pages of Dig. at an ALAN breakfast a couple of years ago and before it was spread around, I had to stop. I knew I was reading a masterpiece. I read a lot of fiction, both YA and adult and I can think of just a few authors whose books that just stop me. In just a few occasions I find a books so remarkable that my reading is stalled. I just have to stop and admire a passage. This has happened with Anne Tyler, John Irving, Joyce Carol Oates, Lawrence Block, Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison, Jacqueline Woodson, and William Faulkner. As I hope you can tell, I think A.S. King is in good company, and if she keeps writing, who knows.
I claim that not only is A.S. King one of the best writers of YA fiction, she is one of the best living writers--period. When I read the first two pages of Dig. at an ALAN breakfast a couple of years ago and before it was spread around, I had to stop. I knew I was reading a masterpiece. I read a lot of fiction, both YA and adult and I can think of just a few authors whose books that just stop me. In just a few occasions I find a books so remarkable that my reading is stalled. I just have to stop and admire a passage. This has happened with Anne Tyler, John Irving, Joyce Carol Oates, Lawrence Block, Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison, Jacqueline Woodson, and William Faulkner. As I hope you can tell, I think A.S. King is in good company, and if she keeps writing, who knows.
“Potatoes are one thing. People are another. You can’t abandon people and think they‘re going to be fine. People need things. Probably love most of all” (King, 2019, p. 208)
We are currently living in an era where radical changes can be made. So many of the inequities in our country are currently being exposed and recognized as part of the human condition, precarious or not. Whether it is racism, sexism, poverty, health care, or mental health, I can think of few other writers whose body of work encompasses these changes more than A.S. King. Nor can I think of such a prolific author who consistently takes risks, questions the status quo, and dares us to become uncomfortable so that we can grow as human beings.
While all of her novels attest to a variety of society’s problems and chart paths of hope for the readers, it is King’s honest portrayal of mental health and trauma that coalesce through the use of surrealism. King distills the essence of trauma and mental illness, de-stigmatizes it surrealistically , then reintroduces them as being an acceptable, albeit painful, part of the human condition. The teens of our lives need this message now more than ever and we, as educators and administrators, can help through providing social support and listening. Giving a student an A.S. King novel can be a non-threatening way to start a dialogue.
While all of her novels attest to a variety of society’s problems and chart paths of hope for the readers, it is King’s honest portrayal of mental health and trauma that coalesce through the use of surrealism. King distills the essence of trauma and mental illness, de-stigmatizes it surrealistically , then reintroduces them as being an acceptable, albeit painful, part of the human condition. The teens of our lives need this message now more than ever and we, as educators and administrators, can help through providing social support and listening. Giving a student an A.S. King novel can be a non-threatening way to start a dialogue.
The world feels surreal right now and her novels welcome surrealism as a means of personal growth. King’s first published novel, Dust of 100 Dogs, features Emer Morrisey, a young girl who emerges physically unscathed after witnessing the brutal sacking of her Irish village by Oliver Cromwell. After this surreal experience, Emer begins to fend for herself only to find her gender and lack of wealth insurmountable obstacles. She bucks tradition and becomes a buccaneer. After maiming and killing thousands, she is crippled by a curse condemning her to live the lives of 100 dogs, memory intact the whole time. After her final life as a dog, Emer finds herself reincarnated and ready to reenact the violence she witnessed as a child. As soon as she’s old enough. Through switching narratives between 1650 various stages of Emer’s life, the reader is given a window into her ability to begin to process the loss of her family and the love of her life as she simultaneously travels to find her buried treasure. In the end, Emer has to choose between revenge and hope, to stay quagmired in the past or to make her peace with the events in her life that harmed her and begin to heal.
With her next novel, King begins to subtly explore trauma with surrealist elements, which won her a Printz Honor Medal as a result. Please Ignore Vera Deitz focuses around how we treat each other as friends and family, and how these choices can weigh heavily on us. Vera’s father even creates visuals for the reader on what we can do to break the cycle. Vera, our protagonist, recently lost her best friend Charlie. She self-medicates in many ways to escape the pain and also to escape trauma of his untimely death. And also to escape the multitudes of Charlies who visit her throughout the book. The themes present in Dust of 100 Dogs, ones of trying to overcome a legacy of poverty, violence, addiction and ignorance, resurface here as Vera comes to terms with Charlie’s death, the state of their friendship, and how little she knows about the people around her. These tenants remain the roots of King’s novels.
 With each additional novel, King offers an unflinching and realistic portrayal of teens and their families. She does not pretend the horrors and realities that teens face every day do not exist. Instead, through her non-linear narratives and use of surrealism, she highlights the difficulties of navigating adolescence under the dark clouds of trauma and mental illness. |  |
For many of us, there is nothing more surreal than trying to manage trauma. By acknowledging this, King creates a viable way for her characters and readers to start processing and dealing with the fallout of trauma Through her surrealist elements, whether it is Socretes making appearances in school auditoriums or characters riding in an invisible helicopter, King takes the reader in hand and walks us down a path to learn how to identify, process, and start to learn to cope, whether the trauma is intergenerational or recent. Or both as in Everybody Sees The Ants.
In Everybody Sees The Ants, King begins tackling the effects of emotional and psychological abuse on adolescents. Lucky Linderman suffers abuse at the hands of a school bully. Meanwhile, his school is more concerned that he conducted his social studies research project on teen suicide. At home, his parents are barely functioning, a result of intergenerational trauma, and he feels the weight of their neglect. The whole family is haunted by Lucky’s grandfather’s disappearance from the Vietnamese jungles. Lucky searches for solutions for this pain through his recurring dreams of rescuing his grandfather. When Lucky is assaulted by a classmate, his mother retreats to Las Vegas to buy them some time to heal. With this transition King continues her on-going commitment to examine family relationships through a trauma lens and models a parent and child identifying what went wrong in their relationships in order to move forward in a healing manner.
In Everybody Sees The Ants, King begins tackling the effects of emotional and psychological abuse on adolescents. Lucky Linderman suffers abuse at the hands of a school bully. Meanwhile, his school is more concerned that he conducted his social studies research project on teen suicide. At home, his parents are barely functioning, a result of intergenerational trauma, and he feels the weight of their neglect. The whole family is haunted by Lucky’s grandfather’s disappearance from the Vietnamese jungles. Lucky searches for solutions for this pain through his recurring dreams of rescuing his grandfather. When Lucky is assaulted by a classmate, his mother retreats to Las Vegas to buy them some time to heal. With this transition King continues her on-going commitment to examine family relationships through a trauma lens and models a parent and child identifying what went wrong in their relationships in order to move forward in a healing manner.
The month of June serves as both PTSD Awareness Month and National Pride Month. According to a 2016 survey conducted by the CDC, 1 out of 6 students nationwide (grades 9–12) seriously considered suicide in the past year. That same study found that LGBTQ+ youth seriously contemplate suicide at almost three times the rate of heterosexual youth and that LGBTQ+ youth are almost five times as likely to have attempted suicide compared to heterosexual youth. While Astrid Jones of Ask The Passengers may not carry this weight on her shoulders yet, she is exploring her feelings about her female co-worker. She is also trying to figure out a way to come out to her family and friends while surfing through the waters of their microaggressions. Throughout this painful process, Astrid is full of love. Love she feels that her family and her community do not want so she lays in her backyard, watching airplanes fly by, and sends the passengers her love. Astrid’s astute realizations about her friends and family show that love, with conditions, can be disinguine. Having to deny her sense of self to please another person should not be the price a person pays for love, a lesson important for all teens. When finally shown unconditional love from her co-worker (and Socrates, who helps her ponder the meaning of life), Astrid is set free to love herself for who she truly is.
Reality Boy, King’s fifth novel, is a complex tale of dysfunction and PTSD. Through it, King asks what is reality? Who decides what is the truth, a question that is imperative in today’s political and social climate. This book critiques the fantasy of reality tv through Gerald, whose family starred in a reality show when he was five. A show that directly resulted in the fantasy of him terrorizing his family. The reality is that he was and is currently being abused by his oldest sister while the adults around him are silent, therefore willing, participants.Their gaslighting and denial create a lonely adolescent plagued with what could be classified as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, represented in the novel through by his violent outbursts, inability to make friends, and frequent dissociative episodes, which are surrealist in nature. Gerald faces a different type of conditional love than Astrid. He is living in unsafe spaces, both at school and at home, something that many students in our classrooms can instantly connect with. Hard work (physical and emotional), love, and support from other adults in his life help Gerald start to turn his life around and the book leaves the reader with a message of hope.
Published in 2014, Glory O’Brien’s History of the Future, is another type of surrealist story. Glory and her best friend, on the cusp of high school graduation, drink a potion of petrified bat that instills in them the ability to see the future. That future is one of civic unrest where The United States is on the cusp of the Second Civil War. It is an America where “a government official will be quoted as saying ‘We’re taking our country back!’” (p. 128). The man who leads this battle cry calls himself Nedrick the Sanctimonious. Does a person need another reason to read this book? If so, then reading how Glory begins to sift through the pain of her childhood and adolescence to awaken to the chance of a future, is a beautiful and breathtaking journey. As the bat tells Glory “Free yourself. Have the courage” (p.304). If not, then I leave you with the thought that this story no longer feels surreal but prophetical in hindsight.
There are many experiences in life that feel surreal: the death of a sibling, surviving a rape, parental neglect, struggling with anxiety and depression. With I Crawl Through It, King weaves those three issues and more into this novel. A girl who has swallowed herself. A boy building an invisible helicopter. A girl who lies melt even easier than butter, and another, who wears a white lab coat wherever she goes. These characters are wrapped deeply in the cloak of surrealism, not to disguise them but in order to allow us to see them for who they are: the students in our classrooms and our buildings or ourselves. Throughout the book, A.S. King weaves together different national absurdities, from cavalier responses to school shootings to parental neglect and abandonment. The fact that all of these things cease to shock society into action is what is truly absurd. By pointing out this hypocrisy, King shouts to all who will read: I am still shocked! I refuse to allow this to be our new normal! I am calling the adults in your life out for their crap. Please do not believe that living like this is ok. The absurdity can slowly begin to end if the privileged acknowledge our individual roles in man’s inhumanity to man and help support a new foundation for our country.
Since I started reading A.S. King novels, I learned that people living with PTSD experience time differently than others. In Still Life With Tornado, King illustrates this through adeptly weaving multiple versions of the main character into same moment throughout in the story to illustrate that a person living with PTSD can be living in the present moment but, in next instant, be trapped inside their trauma(s), even if he or she does not actively understand what is happening,. Sarah, our 16-year-old main character, encounters her 10-year-old self on the public bus. 23-year-old Sarah joins them on the bus to help diffuse the situation. Sarah is on the bus to avoid her tormentor. She spends her weeks searching for answers, denying herself the joy of creating her art and watching a street artist create “original” ideas. She also continues to ride the bus with future versions of herself, who remind her how a current trauma can retrigger a long buried one. The more visits she receives from the different versions of herself, the more she begins to remember the unspoken trauma in her family’s past that occurred when she was ten.
It is difficult to explain the events that happen next. With the addition of multiple versions of the same character criss-crossing through the past and the present settings in the novel, it proved too much to try without charts and graphs (Ken Deitz would be so pleased). I can say that Sarah finds an adult in her life that can help her make positive decisions about her trauma experience. Bruce, her estranged brother, is a counselor. He teaches Sarah boundaries while also talking to school administration to assure her safety. He brings strength to his mother and sister and steers the family in a safer and healthier direction. The characters in Still Life discuss how the absence of violence is not love.
Dig. A.S. King’s majestic battle cry of malarkey onto the siren songs adults so frequently sing: we know what is best, we know what we are doing, we are good people. Having just garnered the Printz Gold, I wanted this post to focus on her other novels, the ones that deserve just as much attention. In her recent acceptance speech (she starts at 30:30) for The Printz Award, she traces the roots of declining mental health of adolescents as the result of “the slow decline of love in our world and who it hurts the most? That would be the children.” for “a country founded on trauma will produce more trauma”. King uses Dig. to highlight just how true that is.
Dig. A.S. King’s majestic battle cry of malarkey onto the siren songs adults so frequently sing: we know what is best, we know what we are doing, we are good people. Having just garnered the Printz Gold, I wanted this post to focus on her other novels, the ones that deserve just as much attention. In her recent acceptance speech (she starts at 30:30) for The Printz Award, she traces the roots of declining mental health of adolescents as the result of “the slow decline of love in our world and who it hurts the most? That would be the children.” for “a country founded on trauma will produce more trauma”. King uses Dig. to highlight just how true that is.
Please put one of these books in the hands of your students. If a novel’s message does not reach the intended individual, A.S. King’s tireless and unrelenting campaign to educate people about mental health and trauma extends beyond her novels and into her actions as well. A quick google search will yield many examples from her tweets to her short essays. They create smaller soundbytes of hope that illustrate how she delivers on the promises of her books through the actions of her life. She dedicates time to the American Foundation For Suicide Prevention, participating in their annual Out Of Darkness Walk in honor of her friends and her daughter, Gracie. Ms. King and her family curated Gracie's List, a book list for the Book Love Foundation. Any library or classroom wanting to promote mental health awareness for students K-12 would grow in leaps and bounds by adding titles from this list. Through these actions, she shows us all how to love and how to remain hopeful in times of darkness.
For so long so many of us hid. We were quiet because we were uncomfortable or unwilling or too frightened. Personally, I do not feel that I have that luxury any more. The young people in our lives need to know that we are working on crushing the stigma behind mental health issues. They do not have to face the road to recovery alone. They will only know that if we speak up and speak out. We can provide guidance and assistance towards finding the right kind of help for the individuals in our classrooms and libraries. Most importantly, we can be quiet. And listen. And place a novel by A.S. King in their hands.
For so long so many of us hid. We were quiet because we were uncomfortable or unwilling or too frightened. Personally, I do not feel that I have that luxury any more. The young people in our lives need to know that we are working on crushing the stigma behind mental health issues. They do not have to face the road to recovery alone. They will only know that if we speak up and speak out. We can provide guidance and assistance towards finding the right kind of help for the individuals in our classrooms and libraries. Most importantly, we can be quiet. And listen. And place a novel by A.S. King in their hands.
Additional Resources
Works Cited
CDC. (2016). Sexual identity, sex of Sexual Contacts, and health-risk behaviors among students in grades 9-12: Youth risk behavior surveillance. Atlanta, GA: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/65/ss/pdfs/ss6509.pdf
King, A. (2011). Everybody sees the ants. Little, Brown and Company.
King, A. (2012). Ask the passengers. Little, Brown and Company.
King, A. (2013). Reality boy. Little, Brown and Company.
King, A. (2014). Glory o’brien’s history of the future. Little, Brown and Company.
King, A. (2015). I crawl through it. Little, Brown and Company.
King, A. (2017). Still life with tornado. Penguin Books.
King, A. (2017). The dust of 100 dogs. Speak.
King, A. (2019). Dig. Dutton Books.
King, A. (2011). Everybody sees the ants. Little, Brown and Company.
King, A. (2012). Ask the passengers. Little, Brown and Company.
King, A. (2013). Reality boy. Little, Brown and Company.
King, A. (2014). Glory o’brien’s history of the future. Little, Brown and Company.
King, A. (2015). I crawl through it. Little, Brown and Company.
King, A. (2017). Still life with tornado. Penguin Books.
King, A. (2017). The dust of 100 dogs. Speak.
King, A. (2019). Dig. Dutton Books.
Until next time.
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