Pick the Lock

by A. S. King

Overview

From Michael L. Printz Award winner A.S. King, a weird and insightful new novel about a girl intent on picking the lock of her toxic family.

Jane Vandermaker-Cook would like her mother back. As Jane's mother tours the world to support the family, Jane lives and goes to school in a Victorian mansion with her younger brother and their mendacious father who confines Jane’s mother to a system of pneumatic tubes whenever she’s at home. And then there's weirdly ever-present Aunt Finch, Milorad the gardener, and his rat, Brutus. For Jane, this all seems normal until she suddenly gains access to the files for a lifetime of security-camera videos—her lifetime.

A.S. King's latest surrealist masterpiece follows Jane’s bizarre and brilliant journey to reconnect with her mother by breaking out of her shell and composing a punk opera.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593353981
Publisher:	Penguin Young Readers Group
Publication date:	09/30/2025
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.81(d)
Age Range:	14 - 17 Years

About the Author

A.S. King is the award-winning author of many acclaimed books for young readers. Her novel Dig won the 2020 Michael L. Printz Award, and Ask The Passengers won the 2013 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. The New York Times called her "one of the best YA writers working today." In 2022, she was awarded the American Library Association's Margaret A. Edwards Award for her significant contribution to YA literature. King lives with her family in Pennsylvania, where she returned after living on a farm and teaching adult literacy in Ireland for more than a decade. www.as-king.com

Read an Excerpt

Prologue:
Lesson One

I do not lie to God.
God, in this sense, can be whatever you want it to be—but the one thing God cannot be is a liar or a believer of lies or a perpetuator of lies or an eater of lies or a baker of lies or a bartender of lies. God / the universe can shake up a cocktail and serve it to you, but if you need lies to survive, you must tell your own stories / add your own garnish.
God will watch you from behind the bar.
God will nod and smile as you eat the cherry.
God knows you are imperfect.You do not.
God forgives you.
You do not.
This is why you lie to God.
And so, Lesson One is easy.
I am imperfect. I forgive myself. I do not lie to God.
I first learned this lesson when I was four years old. I have not strayed. I am humble in the light of the universe—I have earned my place.
My father lies to God. All the time.
Today he said, “God knows, we tried all we could before she went into the System.”
She is my mother.
We is him.
Tried means he didn’t like her the way she was.
The System is how Mother travels now, contained in a tidy capsule.
God knows.
My father should not be the keeper of God’s words. He is a liar and a thief.
God knows.My father cannot think God’s thoughts. He is a traitor and a brute.
God knows.
God shouldn’t even be allowed in his mouth—my father is a killer.
He made my mother into a fast-­moving message. Fed her into a tube.The message reads, “I am an example of what happens when a coward lies to God.”
My father.
God knows.
Our teacher. Our captor. Our hero.
His Lesson One is: The World and Its Seven Continents: Overview.
My Lesson One is: DO NOT LIE TO GOD.

Editorial Reviews

"A roller coaster of a book, Pick the Lock is one thrill after another."—NPR

"Rendered with prodigious imagination and raw emotion, King’s surrealistic world is not too far from our own."—The Boston Globe

★ "Printz Award–winning King has written another remarkable, character-driven book that dazzles with its originality. With that and its employment of magic realism, it is sui generis, and at 400-plus pages, it is one of King’s most ambitious, and most successful, books. And that, God knows, is no lie."—Booklist, starred review

★ "A worthy literary heir to feminist novels like The Stepford Wives, updated and recast for a new generation, this is a much-needed, thought-provoking tale of survival and triumph.”—BCCB, starred review

★ "Cathartic."—Horn Book, starred review

★ "A young adult feminist anthem that thoughtfully addresses issues of abuse."—SLJ, starred review

★ "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. [B]eathtakingly successful."—Shelf Awareness, starred review

"A.S. King always leans into the weaird and surreal (think Vonnegut with a 16-year-old girls at the centre).... This strange, ambitious novel takes its young readers—and their pain—seriously."—The Irish Times

"Helmed by Jane’s penetrating commentary, this unconventional narrative melds punk anthems and bewildering interludes from a shape-shifting rat with King’s quirky blend of present-day issues and mind-bending twists to unlock complex, thought-provoking insight."—Publishers Weekly

An NPR Best Book of the Year
A Boston Globe Best Book of the Year
A Chicago Public Library Best Book of the Year
A Shelf Awareness Best Book of the Year
A Horn Book Fanfare Book

From the Publisher

Jorjeana Marie portrays the innocence, resilience, and burgeoning rebellion of 16-year-old Jane, daughter of punk rock star Mina Placenta. The years of spousal abuse experienced by Mina are revealed by security tapes taken in her home. Marie's narration gains gravity and menace when Vernon, Jane's controlling, abusive father, speaks. It softens when expressing the tenderness of Mina who, when not touring, is imprisoned in pneumatic tubes throughout the house. A.S. King's authoritative voice, along with musical riffs, delineates the punk opera sections that are Jane's creative outlet. Max Meyers's threatening tones define the evil of a shape-shifting rat who promises destruction. Amid these surreal elements, Marie projects Jane's intensity, her determination to escape the abusive environment of her family, and the freedom experienced by all at the audio's end. S.W. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine

NOVEMBER 2024 - AudioFile

2024-05-30
A white teen living a sheltered life seeks to break her rock-star mother out of the cycle of abuse perpetrated on their family.

Sixteen-year-old Jane lives in a large, old Victorian house with younger brother Henry, father Vernon, their cook, their gardener—and Mina, her mother, who, when she’s not out on tour with her world-famous punk band, Placenta, is confined by Vernon to a system of pneumatic tubes that traverse their house. Ever since the onset of the global pandemic over four years ago, Jane and Henry haven’t been allowed to return to school, instead receiving a bizarre regimen of home-school instruction from Vernon, while Mina watches on helplessly from her capsule in the tubes. Only when Jane stumbles on a cache of home movies—actually security camera footage from around their house dating back to her parents’ courtship days—does she begin to gain some perspective on her dysfunctional, abusive family life. In secret, she starts composing a punk opera to express her desire to save her mother from the life she seems trapped in. When Mina leaves to go on tour for Placenta’s latest album, Jane uses her wits to mount a nascent, persistent rebellion against Vernon’s toxic grip on their family’s psyche. Expertly blending fabulism with hard realism and Victorian language with contemporary teen-speak, this powerful narrative examines the myriad effects of emotional and physical abuse on a family.

Painful yet compulsively readable.(Fiction. 14-18)

Kirkus Reviews