Kristen Millares Young was a prize-winning journalist when I first met her and I first read the beginning of Subduction in a class I taught at the Port Townsend Writer’s Conference. It was clear she was both talented and ambitious and her pages were sharp and refined. Since then, she’s honed her craft, developing a prose style the Washington Post called “quiet beauty, deep emotion and sharp observation.” Of her debut novel Subduction, just out from Red Hen Press, I wrote this for a blurb, “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.” And I meant it. Named a staff pick by The Paris Review, Subduction explores legacy, cultural identity and consent through the sexual entanglement of two people trying to salvage their lives from wreckage of their own making.
—Robert Lopez