Book Review: Please Ignore Vera Dietz

A.S. King’s writing wows me because it’s fearless and original. King writes about everyday, ordinary people who are extraordinary on the inside. Take for example, Vera Dietz, the main character of Please Ignore Vera Dietz. Vera is an eighteen-year-old “pizza delivery technician” bound for future greatness. Readers aren’t actually privy to fictional Vera’s ultimate destiny, but if she were real, Vera would be one of those high-schoolers who transcends a not-so-perfect, sometimes ugly-duckling adolescence to soar like a bad-ass swan. Vera = main character you’ll root for instantly.

King also makes me adore flawed people like Charlie, Vera’s true love. He’s the troubled boy next door, “a bright blazing sun [because] He came from [a home that is] endless, cold black space.” 

Then, there’s Ken Dietz, Vera’s Dad. Ever notice how parents are mostly missing in YA books? To be fair, what teen wants to read about Mom or Dad? But King gives this father a narrative voice, and Mr. Dietz has something important to say. The Ken Dietz monologues and flow charts detailing life lessons were some of my favorite chapters in this book.

Of course, I  also love that A.S. King even gave the town monument a narrative voice. How much does that rock? Having inaminate objects speak to readers is something very few people can pull off, but King can.

The reason you should read this book, though, is not because it won a Printz Honor Award. Nor is it because King is a force of nature writer with a terrific voice (see my review of her first novel, too).

Read her books because they have substance; they deliver important social messages without being preachy. The theme of Vera Dietz, for example, is “Tell!” There are secrets we keep as people, as a society, that we shouldn’t. There are times we turn a blind eye to crime, to pain, to say, the man next door who is beating the hell out of his wife. Things like this happen in King's novel; yet Please Ignore Vera Dietz provides a compassionate look into why people keep secrets while also showing what disasters can happen when they do and what hope is gained by speaking out.

Another theme in this book is that of nuture or nature. Can the MCs rise above bad genes and/or bad environment? Can anybody? In sum, Please Ignore Vera Dietz is a novel full of pain and redemption and grace. And in the end, those are always my favorite kind of stories.