"A.S. King's novels...are in another solar system entirely."--Bookpage, starred review

The Shoveler, the Freak, CanIHelpYou?, Loretta the Flea-Circus Ring Mistress, and First-Class Malcolm. These are the five teenagers lost in the Hemmings family's maze of tangled secrets. Only a generation removed from being Pennsylvania potato farmers, Gottfried and Marla Hemmings managed to trade digging spuds for developing subdivisions and now sit atop a seven-figure bank account--wealth they've declined to pass on to their adult children or their teenage grandchildren. "Because we want them to thrive," Marla always says. What does thriving look like? Like carrying a snow shovel everywhere. Like selling pot at the Arby's drive-thru window. Like a first-class ticket to Jamaica between cancer treatments. Like a flea-circus in a double-wide. Like the GPS coordinates to a mound of dirt in a New Jersey forest. As the rot just beneath the surface of the Hemmings' precious suburban respectability begins to spread, the far-flung grandchildren gradually find their ways back to one another, just in time to uncover the terrible cost of maintaining the family name.

With her inimitable prose and keen insight into teenage experience, A.S. King explores how a corrosive culture of polite, affluent white supremacy tears a family apart and how one determined generation can save themselves.

This book has been graded for interest at 14+ years.

There are 400 pages in this book. This book was published 2019 by Penguin Putnam Inc .

A. S. King is the author of the 2011 Printz Honor Book Please Ignore Vera Dietz (Knopf, 2010) and The Dust of 100 Dogs (Flux, 2009). Her short fiction, poetry and nonfiction have been widely published, and several of her stories have won awards including a nomination for the Best New American Voices anthology