I Crawl Through It by A.S. King | Rating: ★★★☆☆ (3.5)

"We're alive. We have words and shapes and ideas. We will throw them at you when you do not believe. We will throw our love and our hate and our failure and success. We'll split in two right in front of you and be our best and our worst. We'll lie and tell the truth."

As a note, an e-galley of this novel was sent to me via NetGalley by the publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not effect my opinions in any way.  

A.S. King’s latest published work relies heavily on surrealism and the complexities of human emotions; tying everything together gracefully and making the experience of reading it both fun and full of depth.

I Crawl Through It isn’t my usual sort of read, and while it isn’t my favorite release of the year, it is still something I’m glad I read. There's just something about it that spoke to me in the long run. Long story short: it’s an engaging read that started off slow but really kicked your ass the longer you read, the more you learned and the more you got used to all its quirks.

It’s entire prose is something you don’t see often in young adult fiction and what it creates is something that will be interpreted different amongst its audience. King’s characters everything that strong leads should be: relatable, sarcastic, brave, intelligent, fun, secretive and full of the horrors of life.

Most importantly, they are alive and crawling through life for solutions of their own. Their problems are real, their thoughts are colorful, the way they are developed is unique and dark and beautiful.


It breathes life into them as they seek out the resolutions to their history and look to the future.

There are so many layers to each character; Stanzi, China, Lansdale are everything you could ask for in narrators and their characteristics, their thoughts and their struggles become your pain and you grow highly invested in their outcome. If you were wondering, I genuinely loved them all in different ways but China was my absolute favorite.

I loved her poems, I loved her thoughts and I grew very attached to her very quickly.

Although I had some issues getting into I Crawl Through It at the start, although it isn’t going to be for everyone, I do believe that the story itself is satisfying and unique in many ways. It really draws you in and picks up the pace mid-book; making up for the choppy way it begins.

I Crawl Through It would have been destined for a four star, maybe even five star, review had it not taken a bit longer than expected to get into. I’m not one to typically seek out books that are so surrealist, but this one sold me on it all.

I was very surprised with how it all turned out, how fond of the characters and their stories I grew; I devoured every word and found myself highlighting many parts of the novel.

A.S. King’s writing is the sort where you can feel her tapping into part of your soul, part of your passion and fears and that’s ultimately what made my fondness for this story grow. And I know that this novel made me want to seek out more of her work and I hope the same feeling will grow in everyone else who decides to read this or is unfamiliar with her work.

Also, as a bonus quote from the novel, I leave you with this: "Somewhere in every mind is an opening to crawl through.