Description

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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.

About the Author

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A.S. King is the bestselling and award-winning author of many acclaimed books for young readers. Her novel Dig won the 2020 Michael L. Printz Award, and Ask The Passengers won the 2013 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She edited The Collectors: Stories, winner of the 2024 Michael L. Printz Award, the first anthology to win the award. The New York Times called her "one of the best YA writers working today." In 2022, she was awarded the American Library Association's Margaret A. Edwards Award for her significant contribution to YA literature. King lives with her family in Pennsylvania, where she returned after living on a farm and teaching adult literacy in Ireland for more than a decade. www.as-king.com