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3.0 

Pick the Lock

By A.S. King
Pick the Lock by A.S. King digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

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.

Jane Vandermaker-Cook would like her mother back. As Jane's mother tours the world to support the family, Jane lives and goes to school in a Victorian mansion with her younger brother and their mendacious father who confines Jane’s mother to a system of pneumatic tubes whenever she’s at home. And then there's weirdly ever-present Aunt Finch, Milorad the gardener, and his rat, Brutus. For Jane, this all seems normal until she suddenly gains access to the files for a lifetime of security-camera videos—her lifetime.

A.S. King's latest surrealist masterpiece follows Jane’s bizarre and brilliant journey to reconnect with her mother by breaking out of her shell and composing a punk opera.

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34 Reviews

3.0
Thinking Face“DNF at 39% Honestly when I found myself struggling at 150 pages out of 400 I knew I had to stop before I got into a reading slump. The plot of the book was very interesting but I had a hard time keeping everything straight, the father in the story was obviously what seemed to be the main problem for the protagonist, even though she doesn’t realize it. The mother being confined to a type of cell or “system” is that personally threw me off because I couldn’t exactly wrap my head around it. Jane was a hard character to follow because even with it being evident she used escapism from her situationI found it to read as a lesser reading level. I understand that that could have been intentional but for me it just got repetitive. So with all that combined with the slow pacing, it was a train wreck for me and just had to put it down.”

About A.S. King

A.S. King is the 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. 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

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