Pick the Lock
by A.S. King
High School    Dutton    400 pp.
9/24    9780593353974    $19.99
e-book ed.  9780593353998    $10.99

Jane, sixteen, lives with her father, Vernon; her younger brother, Henry; house staff; and a rat in a Victorian-style mansion that has been in her mother’s family for generations. Mom is a punk rock star (a “feminist archangel of compassion”) who is often out on tour and is made a prisoner when at home: she’s confined to a system of human-sized pneumatic tubes installed throughout the house. Jane doesn’t think to question the setup—manipulative, controlling Vernon having so thoroughly and cruelly turned her and Henry against their mother—until she discovers “home movies” (i.e., surveillance videos) that allow her to witness the truth. She begins a process of unlearning that includes writing a punk opera called Free Mother, alerting school administrators to her educational neglect (Vernon has nominally homeschooled the children since the COVID-19 quarantine), tanking forced encounters with “suitors,” and embracing her queer identity. The story begins in September 2024 and ends in March 2025, with frequent jumps in time, digressions into the fantastical and surreal, and variations in storytelling format: Jane’s main narrative, song lyrics, video transcripts, lists, postcards, the rat’s first-person perspective, and more. The emotional landscape is similarly vast: bewilderment, rage, regret, sorrow, empathy, enlightenment. “How easily tricked we can be. How easily influenced. How mean. How simply honest we can be. How beautifully influenced. How kind,” observes Jane, in a well-earned and cathartic ending.

From the ">November/December 2024 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.