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Summary
Summary
In this masterpiece about freedom, feminism, and destiny, Printz Honor author A.S. King tells the epic story of a girl coping with devastating loss at long last--a girl who has no idea that the future needs her, and that the present needs her even more.
Graduating from high school is a time of limitless possibilities--but not for Glory, who has no plan for what's next. Her mother committed suicide when Glory was only four years old, and she's never stopped wondering if she will eventually go the same way...until a transformative night when she begins to experience an astonishing new power to see a person's infinite past and future. From ancient ancestors to many generations forward, Glory is bombarded with visions--and what she sees ahead of her is terrifying: A tyrannical new leader raises an army. Women's rights disappear. A violent second civil war breaks out. And young girls vanish daily, sold off or interned in camps. Glory makes it her mission to record everything she sees, hoping her notes will somehow make a difference. She may not see a future for herself, but she'll do anything to make sure this one doesn't come to pass.
Author Notes
A. S. (Amy Sarig) King is an award-winning author of both YA and adult fiction. She was born on March 10, 1970, in Reading, PA., and obtained a degree in traditional photography from the Art Institute of Philadelphia.
King wrote her first novel in 1994, but it took her 15 years and more than seven novels to finally get published. Since then, her books have garnered many accolades. Ask the Passengers won the 2012 Los Angeles Times Book Award for Young Adult Literature. Please Ignore Vera Dietz was a 2011 Michael L. Printz Honor Book, an Edgar Award Nominee, a Junior Library Guild selection and a YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults pick. Her first YA novel, The Dust of 100 Dogs, was an ALA Best Book for Young Adults, and a Cybil Award finalist.
Her other titles include: I Crawl Through it, Glory O'Brien's History of the Future, Reality Boy, and Everybody Sees the Ants. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous collections and anthologies, including: Monica Never Shuts up, One Death, Nine stories, Losing It, Break These Rules, and Dear Bully.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Starred Review. High school graduation has already prompted Glory O'Brien to confront the chronic malaise she's felt since her mother's suicide 13 years earlier. Then she and Ellie, a friend who lives in a hippie commune across the street, swirl the ashes of a mummified bat (you read that right) into their beers, and both girls begin receiving "transmissions" from everyone they encounter: "We could see the future. We could see the past. We could see everything." From these visions, Glory learns of a second Civil War, set in motion by misogynistic legislation aimed at preventing women from receiving equal pay for equal work. Writing an account of the events she's learning about from the transmissions helps Glory see a future for yourself and understand the ways in which her mother's legacy and her father's love have shaped her into the thoughtful, mature young woman she is. The bizarre bat-swilling episode recedes, revealing a novel full of provocative ideas and sharply observed thoughts about the pressures society places on teenagers, especially girls. Ages 15-up. Agent: Michael Bourret, Dystel & Goderich Literary Management. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Horn Book Review
Still haunted by her mother's suicide years ago, seventeen-year-old Glory is certain she'll die young, too, and can envision no future for herself. Until, that is, she ingests dessicated bat remains and begins receiving eerie "transmissions" from people around her -- details about and images of their ancestors and/or descendants. The scenes from the future depict a shocking Second Civil War, sparked by rampant institutional misogyny, in which a white-haired Glory is a prominent rebel fighter. Maybe she does have a life ahead of her after all. As in King's Ask the Passengers (rev. 1/13) and Everybody Sees the Ants (rev. 1/12), magical realism serves to broaden the novel's societal critique (of parasitic friendships, dysfunctional families, and anti-feminism), expanding the book's purview and allowing Glory to comment on the past, present, and future. Again, the protagonist is deeply scarred yet buoyed by a wry sense of humor and a thoughtful intelligence; again, mysterious (and fascinating) visions provide the struggling teen with hope and a reason to live. Glory has always gotten crap for being a feminist ("Why did everyone mix up that word so much?") -- but it will make her important to the future uprising; instead of following in her mother's footsteps, she now knows she's destined for a long, and meaningful, life. King's distinctive approach to fashioning a story of adolescent strife results in a book that's not only thoroughly original but also uniquely compelling and deeply memorable. jennifer m. brabander (c) Copyright 2015. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Glory and her best friend, Ellie, drink a bat. They mix its desiccated remains with some warm beer on an impulsive night, and now they see visions of the past and future for everyone they encounter. But Glory's not sure she has a future. She graduated high school with no plans for college, and she's worried that she's doomed to be just like her mom, a talented photographer who killed herself when Glory was only four. The future she sees for others, however, is plagued by misogynistic violence, and when she doesn't see herself or her descendants in any of the visions, she starts rooting around in her mother's darkroom and journals for clues that will help her free herself from a futureless fate. King performs an impressive balancing act here, juggling the magic realism of Glory's visions with her starkly realistic struggle to face her grief, feel engaged with her own life, and learn anything that she can about her mother. Imbuing Glory's narrative with a graceful, sometimes dissonant combination of anger, ambivalence, and hopefulness that resists tidy resolution, award-winning King presents another powerful, moving, and compellingly complex coming-of-age story.--Hunter, Sarah Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
NEAR THE MIDWAY point of her wickedly clever new novel, "Glory O'Brien's History of the Future," A.S. King puts this into the mouth of her 17-year-old narrator: "We form. We shine. We boom. Kapow." The entire history of the universe, all 13 billion years of it, in seven little words. If only our high school history teachers had been this succinct. That's one of the novel's major themes, the meaning of existence. So are suicide, male chauvinism, consumerism, parasitism, identity, war, betrayal, friendship, depression, codependency, and probably a few others that flew beneath this reader's radar in his mad dash to reach the end. King has written a genre-busting battlefield of a book, in which melodrama wars with magic realism and the banal duels with the Big Idea. Navigating through Glory O'Brien's story is like running through a minefield while drones drop bombs and snipers take aim from every tree. To which the teenager living inside my head (why won't he go away already?) replies, "Yeah, welcome to my life." Glory's story begins at an ending. It's the eve of her high school graduation. Childhood is over. The indiscernible future looms. Glory, like her best friend, Ellie, who lives across the street in a commune that Glory's parents helped found, has no real plan besides a vague desire to escape her Pennsylvania hometown - or perhaps merely to escape the burden of the uncomfortable fact that suicide runs in families. In the beginning, Glory seems a prime candidate for self-annihilation: depressed, hiding behind her camera and harboring a sardonic attitude that would be annoying if she wasn't so damn funny. This is the melodrama. Cue the magic realism: The girls find a mummified bat. They drop the body into a jar and, after a few days, it turns to dust, which they mix with beer and drink because why not? Soon Ellie and Glory are endowed - or cursed, depending on how you look at it - with the ability to see the "infinities" of everyone they meet. Ancient ancestors, descendants thousands of years into the future. And what a future. A second American civil war. State-sanctioned misogyny on a terrifying scale. Kidnappings, murders, families ripped asunder. In the finest absurdist tradition, King stirs dark comedy into the mayhem. A smart move, because otherwise Glory's visions would come off as a strident, hyper-feministic screed. Meanwhile the girls grapple with the typical problems: boys, parents, friendship, boredom. They must also deal with lice and other parasites, including those of the sexual variety, and the commune dwellers squatting on the O'Brien land. Glory discovers her mother's journals, triggering a quest to understand why her mother abandoned her before either really knew the other. She and Ellie drift apart. She and her father draw closer. Scenes of reconciliation and revelation abound: the banal. Maybe there are writers more adept than King at capturing the outrageous and outraged voice of teenagers, but it's difficult to think of one. Her Glory is a wondrous creation, sarcastic, witty, sensitive, insightful, the kind of girl other girls (O.K., guys too) wish they were (or, probably more likely and more often than is the case, think they are). On the suicide of her mother, Sylvia Plath style, when Glory was 4: "My mother wasn't conveniently dead, like in so many stories about children." After Glory and Ellie ingest the remains of the dead bat: "Seventeen is the average age of one's first sexual encounter in America. I'm not sure what the average age of bat ingestion is." Some might consider Glory's insights an unseemly glimpse behind the curtain, but the conceit is well accepted and timetested. If Glory told her story differently, we might feel betrayed. And betrayal is the name of the game here. Glory feels betrayed by her mother's death, her father's retreat from his dream (he gives up painting to be an online computer consultant), her best friend's self-centeredness and obsession with sex, her culture's materialism and sexism, her vanished childhood. The runaway train that hurtles toward her future goes one way, and there are no brakes. That we have no choice but to get on board is at the heart of all existential betrayal, so grossly unfair that Glory's mom decides to disembark before the inevitable crash into oblivion. What is the answer? Or is that an absurd question because it really isn't a question at all? Nothing lasts forever, not even the stars. We form. We shine. We boom. Kapow. RICK YANCEY is the author of "The 5th Wave" and its sequel, "The Infinite Sea."
School Library Journal Review
Starred Review. Gr 9 Up-King returns with another wholly original work of magical realism. This eerie, provocative title centers on Glory O'Brien, on the verge of graduating high school. Though talented and whip-smart, Glory is an outsider whose social interactions are largely limited to her only friend, Ellie, who lives across the street in a commune, and her father, a one-time painter who's been floundering since the suicide of Glory's mother 12 years earlier. Both girls realize they have the power to see the past-and future-of strangers around them, and Glory slowly understands that an incredibly disturbing, Handmaid's Tale -esque future lies in store, with the rights of women and girls being eroded and a second civil war breaking out. The teen is confronted not only by her future but by the past: she fears that she'll go down the same path as her psychologically unstable mother and begins to learn about a falling-out that took place between her parents and Ellie's years ago. As with works such as Ask the Passengers (2012) and Everybody Sees the Ant s (2011, both Little, Brown), King has developed an unusual protagonist, yet one with a distinct and authentic voice. Elevating herself above the pack and imbuing her novel with incredible nuance, King artfully laces themes of disintegrating friendship, feminism, and sexuality into the narrative, as well as some provocative yet subtle commentary on the male gaze and the portrayal of women in our culture. This beautifully strange, entirely memorable book will stay with readers.- Mahnaz Dar, School Library Journal (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
An indictment of our times with a soupon of magical realism. The daughter of a gifted photographer who spun out Sylvia Plath-style, Glory seems bent on following in her mother's footsteps in more ways than one as she finishes high school. But after Glory and her lifelong frenemy and neighbor Ellie make a reckless late-night decision, they are cast headlong into a spell that allows them to see the pasts and the futures of the people who cross their paths, stretching many generations in both directions, and Glory's life changes course. As with King's other protagonists (Please Ignore Vera Dietz, 2010; Reality Boy, 2013), Glory's narration is simultaneously bitter, prickly, heartbreaking, inwardly witty and utterly familiar, even as the particulars of her predicament are unique. The focus on photography provides both apt metaphors and nimble plot devices as Glory starts writing down her visions in order to warn future Americans about the doom she foresees: a civil war incited by a governmental agenda of misogyny. Glory's chilling visions of the sinister dystopia awaiting the United States are uncomfortably believable in this age of frustrated young men filling "Pickup Artist" forums with misogynistic rhetoric and inexperienced young women filling Tumblrs with declarations of "I don't need feminism because." With any luck, Glory's notebook will inspire a new wave of activists. (Fiction. 14 up) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.