Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Annelie Geissler
Categories
Children’s, Teenage & Educational

PICK THE LOCK

A.S. King

From Michael L. Printz Award winner A.S. King, a weird and insightful new novel about a girl intent on picking the lock of her toxic family.

Jane Vandermaker-Cook would like her mother back. As Jane's mother tours the world to support the family, Jane lives and goes to school in a Victorian mansion with her younger brother and their mendacious father who confines Jane's mother to a system of pneumatic tubes whenever she's at home. And then there's weirdly ever-present Aunt Finch, Milorad the gardener, and his rat, Brutus. For Jane, this all seems normal until she suddenly gains access to the files for a lifetime of security-camera videosher lifetime. A.S. King's latest surrealist masterpiece follows Jane's bizarre and brilliant journey to reconnect with her mother by breaking out of her shell and composing a punk opera. Hailed by the New York Times as "one of the best YA writers working today," A.S. King is the author of over a dozen books for young readers. She is the only two-time winner of the Michael L. Printz Award. She is the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She is the recipient of both the Margaret A. Edwards Award and the ALAN Award for her lifetime contributions to young adult literature. King lives with her family in Pennsylvania, where she returned after living on a farm and teaching adult literacy in Ireland for more than a decade.

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Book Published 2024-09-24 by Dutton Books for Young Readers

Comments

Printz Awardwinning King has written another remarkable, character-driven book that dazzles with its originality. With that and its employment of magic realism, it is sui generis, and at 400-plus pages, it is one of King's most ambitious, and most successful, books.

King delivers a searing, surreal novel about toxic relationships and systemic abuse. Metaphors for the entrapment of women in situations that foster abuse crystallize in an actual system of fabricated tubes, underground stations, and spider-webbing truths that Jane processes by composing a mobilizing, original punk opera. Helmed by Jane's penetrating commentary, this unconventional narrative melds punk anthems and bewildering interludes from a shape-shifting rat with King's quirky blend of present-day issues and mind-bending twists to unlock complex, thought-provoking insight.

Unfolding in a combination of narrative forms, including snippets about daily life, scenes from recorded security footage, set pieces from Jane's punk opera libretto, her mother's lyrics, and observations from a shape-shifting pet rat, the story uses coded language to draw readers into the challenge of unpacking the truth of Jane's toxic and terrifying reality. The result is a stunning novel of pain and power that lays bare the complexities of gaslighting, psychological violence, family trauma, and the social structures that normalize them.Surreal elements, meanwhile, add discomforting strangeness and empowering hope. A worthy literary heir to feminist novels like The Stepford Wives, updated and recast for a new generation, this is a much-needed, thought-provoking tale of survival and triumph.