Dig

By: A.S. King

Narrated by: A.S. King, Mike Chamberlain, Tonya Cornelisse, Kirby Heyborne

Winner of the Michael L. Printz Medal

★“King’s narrative concerns are racism, patriarchy, colonialism, white privilege, and the ingrained systems that perpetuate them. . . . [Dig] will speak profoundly to a generation of young people who are waking up to the societal sins of the past and working toward a more equitable future.”—Horn Book, starred review

“I’ve never understood white people who can’t admit they’re white. I mean, white isn’t just a color. And maybe that’s the problem for them. White is a passport. It’s a ticket.”

Five estranged cousins are lost in a maze of their family’s tangled secrets. Their grandparents, former potato farmers Gottfried and Marla Hemmings, managed to trade digging spuds for developing subdivisions and now they sit atop a million-dollar bank account—wealth they’ve refused to pass on to their adult children or their five teenage grandchildren. “Because we want them to thrive,” Marla always says.

But for the Hemmings cousins, “thriving” feels a lot like slowly dying of a poison they started taking the moment they were born. As the rot beneath the surface of the Hemmings’ white suburban respectability destroys the family from within, the cousins find their ways back to one another, just in time to uncover the terrible cost of maintaining the family name.

With her inimitable surrealism, award winner A.S. King exposes how a toxic culture of polite white supremacy tears a family apart and how one determined generation can dig its way out.

pretty good

loved the mystery of the story and how it all comes together in the end.

One of the best audiobooks

This was so good, I need to read more from a.s king ASAP. All hail potatoes

holy crap

My favorite book so far this year. Incredibly well written and performed. AS King deserves all the accolades she's received for this novel.

Read it!

What an incredible book: deep, thoughtful, witty, solid character development, incredible narration, unique, quirky. It’s considered YA but I’d recommend it to anyone high school age and up!

omg wow

quote :
Maybe all girls think this way—that our entire focus should be on getting a guy to fall in love with us. Maybe we’re all in a tunnel that way. And maybe we’re all walking around heartbroken because we just want to be loved in a way that isn’t even possible. Because, let’s face it—boys aren’t taught the same things. They aren’t taught to be prince charming or even nice, for the most part.