In her 11th young adult novel, three-time Michael L. Printz Award-winner A.S. King employs her signature surrealism to portray the emotional reality of domestic abuse through an unflinching feminist gaze.
Pick the Lock follows 16-year-old Jane, who has rarely left her family's estate since March 2020. Her father used the Covid-19 pandemic as a pretext to keep Jane and her younger brother confined to their Victorian mansion, where he has locked her mother into the System, a network of human-sized pneumatic tubes that run throughout the house. When Jane finds a cache of what she calls "home movies," footage from hidden cameras around the house, she finally begins to understand "the truth about everything."
With breathtakingly successful ambition, King shifts between Jane's first-person, occasionally direct-address narration; Jane's descriptions of the "home movies," which enable King to move back and forth in time; Free Mother, the punk-rock libretto Jane writes in her mind "to stay safe"; and interstitials from the perspective of Brutus, who is ostensibly a pet rat.
To readers unfamiliar with King's oeuvre, that might seem like a lot, but Pick the Lock is King at her most accessible, in large part due to how quickly and firmly she anchors readers in Jane's corner. Readers whose lives have been impacted by abuse will want to take care when they engage with King's virtuoso depiction of how it can become normalized within families. Crucially, King also never allows readers to lose sight of the "tender, sweet love unconcerned with control or power" that ultimately empowers Jane to free herself and her family. Teen readers are lucky to have King in their corner. --Stephanie Appell, freelance book reviewer