Book Summary and Reviews of Please Ignore Vera Dietz by A.S. King

Name: Please Ignore Vera Dietz
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Author: A.S. King

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Please Ignore Vera Dietz

by A.S. King

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Published:
Oct 2010, 336 pages

Genre: Literary Fiction
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Summary

Book Summary

Vera's spent her whole life secretly in love with her best friend, Charlie Kahn. And over the years she’s kept a lot of his secrets. Even after he betrayed her. Even after he ruined everything.

So when Charlie dies in dark circumstances, Vera knows a lot more than anyone - the kids at school, his family, even the police. But will she emerge to clear his name? Does she even want to?

Edgy and gripping, Please Ignore Vera Dietz is an unforgettable novel: smart, funny, dramatic, and always surprising.

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Media Reviews

"Starred Review. The book is deeply suspenseful and profoundly human." - Publishers Weekly

"Starred Review. A harrowing but ultimately redemptive tale of adolescent angst gone awry. ... The author depicts the journey to overcome a legacy of poverty, violence, addiction and ignorance as an arduous one, but Vera's path glimmers with grace and hope." - Kirkus

"It will glow in the reader for a long time after the reading, just like the neon red pagoda that watches over Vera and her world." - VOYA

This information about Please Ignore Vera Dietz was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

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Cloggie Downunder

A moving and thought-provoking read.
Please Ignore Vera Dietz is the second novel by American author, A.S. King. We first meet Vera Dietz when she is almost eighteen, a Senior at High School and working forty hours a week as a Pizza Delivery Technician. Her ex-best friend-since-age-four, Charlie Kahn is just days dead, her mother left six years ago with the podiatrist, and the most suitable word Vera can find from her Vocab class to describe her accountant father is parsimonious.

Even if Vera is still angry about the betrayal that ended their friendship five months earlier, she misses Charlie. How can she not when a thousand copies of him fill her dead space whenever she is alone? She knows he wants her to clear his name, but she’s not quite ready to do that yet.

So she distracts herself with her attractive twenty-three-year-old co-worker at Pagoda Pizza, James; and, despite her father’s alcoholic history, with bottles of vodka. At school she sends out “please ignore Vera Dietz” vibes, trying to remain under the radar of one very toxic Jenny Flight and her Detentionhead loser friends, on whom she blames Charlie’s defection and death.

The story of just what happened between Vera and Charlie is told through a split narrative: present day and seven years earlier, with occasional interjections by Ken Dietz (flow-charts a feature), the now-dead Charlie Kahn, and a local landmark, the Pagoda. King’s plot is wholly plausible, and her characters are familiar from any American town. King touches on domestic violence, sexual perversion, and teen alcoholism and drug use.

King is skilled at portraying adolescent characters. Vera is likeable: her relationship with her father and with Charlie are a delight; her dilemmas and issues are realistic; and her strength and maturity are both surprising and gratifying. This reissue from Text Publishing has an eye-catching cover design by Imogen Stubbs. A moving and thought-provoking read.

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Author Information

Biography

A.S. King

A.S. King is also the author of The Dust of 100 Dogs. Amy spent a decade living self-sufficiently on an Irish farm before she returned to the United States. She now lives with her family in a small Pennsylvania town.

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