The 2020 Michael L. Printz Award winner for excellence in young adult literature.
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From the Book Jacket:
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 grandchildren.
"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.
Reviews:
An estranged family’s tragic story is incrementally revealed in this deeply surreal novel.
Alternating narration among five teens, many of them unnamed but for monikers like The Freak, The Shoveler, and CanIHelpYou?, as well as an older married couple, Gottfried and Marla, and the younger of two violent and troubling brothers, an expansive net is cast. An unwieldy list of the cast featured in each part melds well with the frenetic style of this experimental work but does little to actually clarify how they fit together; the first half, at least, is markedly confusing. However, readers able to relax into the chaos will be richly rewarded as the strands eventually weave together. The bitingly sardonic voice of The Freak, who seems to be able to move through space and time, contrasts well with the understated, almost deadpan observations of The Shoveler, and the quiet decency of Malcolm and the angry snark of CanIHelpYou?, who is falling for her biracial (half white, half black) best friend, are distinctly different from Loretta’s odd and sexually frank musings. Family abuse and neglect and disordered substance use are part of the lives of many of the characters here, but it’s made clear that, at the root, this white family has been poisoned by virulent racism.
Heavily meditative, this strange and heart-wrenching tale is stunningly original.
-- Kirkus Reviews
The family tree under examination in the latest novel by King (Still Life with Tornado) is diseased—distorted by racial hatred, drug abuse, poverty, illness, and domestic violence. The patriarch of Pennsylvania’s Hemmings family, Gottfried, earned millions selling the family potato farm to housing developers, alienating his siblings. Marla, his mean-spirited wife, enjoys the spoils while looking down at everyone else, including her offspring and grandchildren. “Marla has no idea she’s white,” observes Malcolm, a grandson, “and the whole world was made for people like her.” The first-person narrative shifts perspectives frequently to introduce four other teens, living in the same small town but largely unknown to each other, and their parents, many of whom are, by turns, judgmental, abusive, or neglectful. Like King’s other novels, this one has a hallucinatory quality that keeps the reader guessing what’s real and what’s not. The payoff is in the profound ending, which pulls together the disparate threads and offers hope that at least some of these characters will dig themselves out from under the legacy of hate they have unwillingly inherited. -- Publishers Weekly