A new edition of Michael L. Printz Award winner A.S. King's brilliant and bizarre story of teenage trauma and standardized tests.
'Kurt Vonnegut might have written a book like this."-New York Times Book Review
Four accomplished teenagers are on the verge of explosion. The anxieties they face at every turn have nearly pushed them to the point of surrender: senseless high-stakes testing, the lingering damage of trauma, the buried grief and guilt of tragic loss. They are desperate to cope-but no one is listening.
So they will lie. They will split in two. They will turn inside out. They will build an invisible helicopter to fly themselves far away from the pressure…but nothing releases the pressure. Because, as they discover, the only way to truly escape their world is to fly right into it.
A.S. King reaches new heights in this groundbreaking work of surrealist fiction; it will mesmerize readers with its deeply affecting exploration of how we crawl through traumatic experience-and find the way out.
A new edition of Michael L. Printz Award winner A.S. King's stunning portrait of a life lived on reality TV.
'A.S. King is one of the best Y.A. writers working today.'-New York Times Book Review
Gerald Faust knows exactly when he started feeling angry: the day his mother invited a reality television crew into his five-year-old life. Twelve years later, he's still haunted by his rage-filled youth-which the entire world got to watch from every imaginable angle-and his anger issues have resulted in violent outbursts, zero friends, and clueless adults dumping him in the special education room at school.
Nothing is ever going to change. No one cares that he's tried to learn to control himself, and the girl he likes has no idea who he really is. Everyone's just waiting for him to snap…and he's starting to feel dangerously close to doing just that.
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 with a punk rock opera.
Jane's mother is an artist constantly on tour to earn a living and support the family. While her mother is away, Jane lives in a Victorian mansion with her younger brother and their controlling, mendacious father and aunt, both of whom have conspired to confine Jane's mother to a system of pneumatic tubes whenever she's at home. Pick the Lock follows Jane's bizarre and brilliant journey to rediscover and reconnect with her mother by composing the libretto for a punk rock opera.
From Michael L. Printz Award winner A.S. King and an all-star team of contributors including Anna-Marie McLemore and Jason Reynolds, an anthology of stories about remarkable people and their strange and surprising collections.
From David Levithan's story about a non-binary kid collecting pieces of other people's collections to Jenny Torres Sanchez's tale of a girl gathering types of fire while trying not to get burned to G. Neri's piece about 1970's skaters seeking opportunities to go vertical-anything can be collected and in the hands of these award-winning and bestselling authors, any collection can tell a story. Nine of the best YA novelists working today have written fiction based on a prompt from Printz-winner A.S. King (who also contributes a story) and the result is itself an extraordinary collection.
* This program includes a downloadable pdf which contains the fully illustrated story, 'Museum of Misery' by Cory McCarthy from the book.
Four teenagers are on the verge of exploding. The anxieties they face at every turn have nearly pushed them to the point of surrender: senseless high-stakes testing, the lingering damage of past trauma, the buried grief and guilt of tragic loss. They are desperate to cope, but no one is listening. So they will lie. They will split in two. They will turn inside out. They will even build an invisible helicopter to fly themselves far away...but nothing releases the pressure. Because, as they discover, the only way to truly escape their world is to fly right into it. The genius of acclaimed author A.S. King reaches new heights in this groundbreaking work of surrealist fiction; it will mesmerize readers with its deeply affecting exploration of how we crawl through traumatic experience-and find the way out.
