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 in Pick the Lock, which 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 footage from hidden cameras around the house, she finally begins to understand "the truth about everything."
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" that ultimately empowers Jane to free herself and her family. --Stephanie Appell, freelance book reviewer