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  • Published: 14 January 2025
  • ISBN: 9780593855454
  • Imprint: Dutton
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $22.99

I Crawl Through It





A new edition of Michael L. Printz Award winner A.S. King's brilliant and bizarre story of teenage trauma and standardized tests.

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.

  • Published: 14 January 2025
  • ISBN: 9780593855454
  • Imprint: Dutton
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $22.99

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Praise for I Crawl Through It


Praise for I Crawl Through It

"King’s devotion to a passionately experimental style, in a genre often beholden to formula, is inspiring. Kurt Vonnegut might have written a book like this.”—New York Times Book Review

"A.S. King has penned an absorbing Rorschach test of a book that, as you turn its pages, manages to read you."—Entertainment Weekly

*"At once a statement on the culture of modern schools as well as mental health issues, this novel is an ambitious, haunting work of art."―School Library Journal, starred review 

*"Masterfully written and brilliantly bizarre, this is King at her most innovative yet." ―VOYA, starred review

*"Beautiful prose, poetry, and surreal imagery combine for an utterly original story that urges readers to question, love, and believe--or risk explosion." ―Booklist, starred review 

*"King's novel blends the magical and the mundane in a deadpan delivery that makes it difficult to tell one from the other. This, of course, is the point of her ambitious and affecting work." ―The Horn Book, starred review

*"It's bizarre, compelling, and not like anything else." ―Publishers Weekly, starred review

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