A.S. King writes young adult novels including Dig, Ask the Passengers, Glory O’Brien’s History of the Future, Please Ignore Vera Dietz, and The Collectors: Stories. She is the only two-time Michael L. Printz Award recipient, and her work has also earned the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Margaret A. Edwards Award, and ALAN Award.
Vera’s spent her whole life secretly in love with her best friend, Charlie Kahn. And over the years she’s kept a lot of his secrets. Even after he betrayed her. Even after he ruined everything. So when Charlie dies in dark circumstances, Vera knows a lot more than anyone—the kids at school, his family, even the police. But will she emerge to clear his name? Does she even want to? Edgy and gripping, Please Ignore Vera Dietz is an unforgettable novel: smart, funny, dramatic, and always surprising.
In this truly original portrayal of a girl struggling to break free of society's definitions, Printz Honor author A.S. King asks readers to question everything—and offers hope to those who will never stop seeking real love. Astrid Jones desperately wants to confide in someone, but her mother's pushiness and her father's lack of interest tell her they're the last people she can trust. Instead, Astrid spends hours lying on the backyard picnic table watching airplanes fly overhead. She doesn't know the passengers inside, but they're the only people who won't judge her when she asks them her most personal questions . . . like what it means that she's falling in love with a girl. As her secret relationship becomes more intense and her friends demand answers, Astrid has nowhere left to turn. She can't share the truth with anyone except the people at thirty thousand feet, and they don't even know she's there. But little does Astrid know just how much even the tiniest connection will affect these strangers' lives—and her own—for the better.
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eBook · Little, Brown Books for Young Readers · 2012 · English
In this masterpiece about freedom, feminism, and destiny, Printz Honor author A.S. King tells the epic story of a girl coping with devastating loss at long last--a girl who has no idea that the future needs her, and that the present needs her even more. Graduating from high school is a time of limitless possibilities--but not for Glory, who has no plan for what's next. Her mother committed suicide when Glory was only four years old, and she's never stopped wondering if she will eventually go the same way...until a transformative night when she begins to experience an astonishing new power to see a person's infinite past and future. From ancient ancestors to many generations forward, Glory is bombarded with visions--and what she sees ahead of her is terrifying: A tyrannical new leader raises an army. Women's rights disappear. A violent second civil war breaks out. And young girls vanish daily, sold off or interned in camps. Glory makes it her mission to record everything she sees, hoping her notes will somehow make a difference. She may not see a future for herself, but she'll do anything to make sure this one doesn't come to pass.
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eBook · Little, Brown Books for Young Readers · 2014 · English
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.
Winner of the 2024 Michael L. Printz Award A National Bestseller 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. M. T. Anderson, e. E. Charlton-Trujillo, A.S. King, David Levithan, Cory McCarthy, Anna-Marie McLemore, G. Neri, Jason Reynolds, Randy Ribay, and Jenny Torres Sanchez have each penned a surprising and provocative tale. (Cover art may vary.)
Hailey in Bookland presents a spoiler-free video review of Please Ignore Vera Dietz; this is coverage of the book rather than an author appearance.
More About A.S. King
A.S. King writes young adult novels that ask how private lives are shaped by family, friendship, power, and the stories people tell about themselves. Her official bibliography ↗ includes Dig ↗, Ask the Passengers ↗, Glory O’Brien’s History of the Future, Please Ignore Vera Dietz, and The Collectors: Stories.
King is the only author to have received the Michael L. Printz Award twice ↗, and her work has also received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize ↗, the Margaret A. Edwards Award, and the ALAN Award. The recognition follows a body of fiction that treats adolescence as a place where social pressure and moral choice meet.
King’s work also travels through classrooms, scholarship, and translation. Her resources page ↗ gathers teaching guides and studies of surrealism, adultism, whiteness, mental health, and healing in her fiction, while its translation record ↗ shows editions reaching readers across numerous languages and markets.
King’s official resource page gathers an interview thesis and peer-reviewed studies addressing surrealism, adultism, whiteness, mental health, and healing in her books.
The same record lists translations and international editions across German, Spanish, Turkish, Korean, Portuguese, Slovakian, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and Italian, among other markets.
