Looking For a Good Book

Wow. I found this to be an extremely powerful book, dealing with hard subjects, written uniquely and creatively and in a way that young adults will likely truly understand.

Four teenagers are looking to escape reality because reality hasn’t done much for them and in their own, unique worlds, they can do and be and achieve anything they want. Take Gustav, for instance … he’s building an invisible helicopter. ‘Stanzi’ can only see it on Tuesdays, but she has every intention of flying away with him when he is done. Stanzi – not her real name, it’s the name of Mozart’s wife, but one she’s adopted to avoid being herself.

China has her own issues – when we first meet her she refers to herself as ‘the girl who swallowed herself’ and later refers to her self as different body parts (“I am China – the gallbladder walking to school”). She also writes poetry. My favorite being:

Finally, rounding out the four young adults is Lansdale, a 17 year old girl who’s sleeping with a 40 year old man. She’s also a pathological liar and comes from a home where her father always seems to be divorcing and dating new women.

In addition to our featured four are the secondary characters, such as the divorcing dad, the parents who are obsessed with visiting sites of school shootings, and ‘dangerous bush man’ – an odd character who hides in the bushes and sells things to people for the price of a kiss.

There’s so much going on here, and none of it easy to decipher, but if you’re willing to sit back, read, and let the characters and story come to you, rather than trying to make sense of everything in real time, it should come to make sense as you go. You might need to harken back to your high school days.

I generally don’t care for a lot of angst and high personal drama in a lot of YA fiction, but this is so different that it really worked for me. I like a challenge – I don’t care for the YA fiction where the main character wears their emotions on their sleeve. Here their true emotions and feelings are masked by the world they invent for themselves. Each world is personal, though others might see the world that was created.

There are some triggers here, particularly rape. It’s not in-your-face obvious, but maybe knowing that there is rape here, the creating a different world begins to make sense.

This is not a book for everybody. Just the surreal nature of the character worlds will put some people off, but I truly enjoy surreal fiction, and I truly believe that if this were published when I was a high school teen it would have been my favorite book. I can picture the teens who would love this book. They look a lot like Stanzi, Lansdale, China, and Gustav – four youngsters who can probably be found in any high school.

Looking for a good book? Hard-hitting and a challenge to read due to the surreal atmosphere, As I Crawl Through It by A. S. King is worth the effort, though it’s definitely not a book for anyone wanting a ‘light’ read.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

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As I Crawl Through It

author: A.S. King

publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Reads

ISBN: 9780316334099

hardcover, 319 pages