Dig

By: A.S. King

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

Length: 10 hrs and 20 mins

Publisher's summary

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.

©2019 A.S. King (P)2019 Listening Library

Critic reviews

Winner of the 2020 Michael L. Printz Medal

A Finalist for the 2020 Los Angeles Times Book Prize

"A.S. King challenges readers from the first page to the last. Dig will make you question the confines of your comfort zone - if you have one. An incredible addition to an already impressive body of work." (Erin Entrada Kelly, New York Times best-selling author and Newbery Medalist)

"King’s fierce empathy for young people is evident throughout, matched by her gift for a brand of weirdness that somehow manages to capture the intensity, wonder and pain of being alive. Anyone who thinks YA books can’t also be great literature needs to read this author." (Irish Times)

"[King's] trademark surrealism and trenchant prose 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." (The Horn Book starred review)

pretty good

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

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!

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.

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.

dark and hopeful

Characters that walk around in your head as you get to know more about them. A complicated story that has a few storylines coming together. So as not to spoil it, I'll be vague: I was left feeling good about the relationships formed, disturbed by what their stories revealed. l loved this book

My favorite of all books

Loved the depth of the content and taking on issues unapologetically. I read a lot of books and this is my favorite of the last five years

An eye-opener

This book tackles a lot of issues we have in society, the main focus is white racism (I'll not say more since it'll spoil it), at times I felt it was over-doing it and made me uncomfortable, but at end you see the point and reason behind this book, theres a lesson to learn.

The writing style is very enjoyable and unique (I have the physical copy too), the story may seem messy and confusing but it eventually all connects.

Bizarre book

The narration was wonderful, but the story was a little convoluted (and nothing that I would have my middle school class read). Just bizarre.