Subduction
Description
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR SUBDUCTION
The brilliance of Subduction only suggests the wonders to come. It is a good day for us when Kristen Millares Young puts pen to paper. Highly recommended.
--Luis Alberto Urrea, winner of the American Book Award, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, author of The House of Broken Angels, The Devil's Highway, Queen of America, Into the Beautiful North, The Hummingbird's Daughter.
In this commanding novel, Kristen Millares Young captures the brutality of an anthropological gaze upon a Makah community. Her complex, exquisitely shaped characters embody the calamity of intrusion and the beauty of resilience.
--Elissa Washuta, author of My Body is a Book of Rules and Starvation Mode
Young beautifully and vividly renders the Pacific Northwest, particularly the unique world of Neah Bay. Subduction is at once a thought-provoking meditation on the geography and geology of the natural world and a generous exploration of the natural shifts and movements that shape her characters.
-- Jonathan Evison, New York Times bestselling author, Lawn Boy, This is Your Life Harriet Chance!, West of Here, All About Lulu, and The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving
Fleeing the shattered remains of her marriage and a betrayal by her sister, in the throes of a midlife freefall, Latina anthropologist Claudia retreats from Seattle to Neah Bay, a Native American whaling village on the jagged Pacific coast. Claudia yearns to lose herself to the songs of the tribe and the secrets of her guide, a spirited hoarder named Maggie. But when, spurred by his mother's failing memory, Maggie's prodigal son Peter returns seeking answers to his father's murder, Claudia discovers in him the abandon she craves. Through the passionate and violent collision of these two outsiders, Subduction portrays not only their strange allegiance after grievous losses but also their imperfect attempts to find community on the Makah Indian Reservation.
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About the Author
Kristen Millares Young is a prize-winning journalist and essayist whose work appears in the Washington Post, the Guardian and the New York Times, along with the anthologies Pie & Whiskey, a 2017 New York Times New & Notable Book, and Latina Outsiders: Remaking Latina Identity. The current Prose Writer-in-Residence at Hugo House, Kristen was the researcher for the New York Times team that produced "Snow Fall," which won a Pulitzer Prize. She graduated from Harvard College with an A.B. in history and literature, later earning her MFA from the University of Washington. From 2016 to 2019, Kristen served as board chair of InvestigateWest, a nonprofit news studio she cofounded in Seattle, where she lives with her family.
Reviews
Author Interview on The Millions with Kirsten Sundburg Lunstrum
Read it at themillions.com/2019/07/on-living-stories-kristen-millares-young-in-conversation-with-kirsten-sundberg-lunstrum.html
MORE ADVANCE PRAISE FOR SUBDUCTION
With dreamlike, salt-water-laced prose that feels born of the Salish Sea, Kristen Millares Young's Subduction lyrically examines relationships strained and forged by place and belonging. Intelligently addressing womanhood, community, lust, and loss, this is a novel as deep as it is intoxicating, as intricate as it is powerful. Like Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, Subduction is a novel to be celebrated for both its poetry and wisdom.
--Sharma Shields, author of The Cassandra
Kristen Millares Young's Subduction is the powerful debut novel from a writer that comes to us fully formed. This book is as unforgettable as it is timely, a story that keeps us riveted from beginning to end, written with abundant grace and lyric intensity. Beautiful, smart, and urgent. Read this book now.
--Robert Lopez, author of Good People, Kamby Bolongo Mean River, Part of the World, All Back Full, and Asunder
Kristen Millares Young's Subduction is a taut, atmospheric tale that gave me what I hope for in a novel: characters that I can care about, in a place that seems real, with stakes that really matter. This is an enormously impressive debut. I'll eagerly await more from this writer.
--Steve Yarbrough: PEN/Faulkner finalist, winner of a Richard Wright Award and a California Book Award. The Unmade World, The Realm of Last Chances, The End of California, Prisoners of War.
Subduction will give you a sense of life lived in the most remote corner of the lower 48, the Makah reservation in Washington State. The ever-changing Pacific Ocean, the emerald forests, the geoduck clams, and the scruffy sea-scoured dwellings are merely the foundation of Kristen Millares Young's suspenseful, atmospheric first novel. The characters leap off the page and into your heart. I wanted to swallow the story whole, and I was happy to know it would take time to savor it. An auspicious debut!
--Patricia Henley, National Book Award finalist, Hummingbird House, In the River Sweet, and Other Heartbreaks
"Love is a kind of home," Kristen Millares Young writes in Subduction. But in the world of this beautifully written novel, home is also a place of secrets, murder, and loss. A tale of taking and giving, resistance and surrender, Subduction raises troubling, provocative questions about our struggle to belong.
--Samuel Ligon, Miller Cane, Among the Dead and Dreaming, Safe in Heaven Dead
Set in the Pacific Northwest, Subduction is a lyrical forest of storytelling rooted in indigenous voices and invaded by those who would steal the tongues and hearts of the ones they love while bartering and betraying the idea of belonging to a land, a birthright, and a family. When you read Kristen Millares Young's words, you understand how it is we can steal, can betray, can love.
--Shawn Wong, Homebase and American Knees
Subduction introduces a welcome new voice in Kristen Millares Young, here telling a taut, fraught story of two people who meet and engage in circumstances that surprise. Both have lived but are seeking to live yet more fully, even as they're beset by their pasts. Whether the way to such realization is with the other is a core part of this vividly written story. Set on Makah Nation land, part of Washington's Olympic Peninsula, Subduction is a searching exploration of historic legacies in the present day. The result: a book of reckoning, full-heartedly told.
--Rick Simonson, Elliott Bay Book Company
"...the book accomplishes something that only the best literature can: It asks the reader to wonder, and to reflect, and to ask crucial questions about society and identity. And it does so in a deeply entertaining and moving story." --Sarah Neilson, The Seattle Times
Mentioned in Vol.1 Brooklyn
Interviewed in The Seventh Wave
Ms. Magazine selection for April 2020 Reads for the Rest of Us, "Feminist Know-It-All"
Featured in the Washington Post
Interview in The Rumpus
Staff pick in the Paris Review
Reviewed in the Women's Review of Books
Featuring in Crosscut
