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Product Description


Stripped down and stylized--the sharpest, boldest, brashest debut of the year
Meet Nikki, the most determined young woman in the North Carolina hills. Determined not to let deadbeats and dropouts set her future. Determined to use whatever tools she can get her hands on to shape the world to her will. Determined to preserve her family's domination of the local drug trade. Nikki is thirteen years old. Opening with a deadly plunge from a high cliff into a tiny swimming hole, Young God refuses to slow down for a moment as it charts Nikki's battles against isolation and victimhood. Nikki may be young, but she's a fast learner, and soon--perhaps too soon, if in fact it's not too late--she knows exactly how to wield her powers over the people around her. The only thing slowing her down is the inheritance she's been promised but can't seem to find, buried somewhere deep in those hills and always just out of reach. With prose stripped down to its bare essence, brash and electrifying, brutal yet starkly beautiful, Katherine Faw Morris's Young God is a debut that demands your attention and won't be forgotten--just like Nikki, who will cut you if you let that attention waver.


Amazon.com Review


An Amazon Best Book of the Month, May 2014: Katherine Faw Morris's voice is terse and vicious, and in her debut Young God, she shows that she can strong arm the reader with few words. Thirteen-year-old Nikki has spent her life in the Carolina hills, a bleak world of drugs, prostitution, and murder. Morris borrows the grit and violence of modern Southern Gothic authors, like Ron Rash or Daniel Woodrell, but her own strengths come from a sense of restraint. Each of Young God's short chapters captures a single breathless moment. Miles Davis famously said, 'It's not the notes you play; it's the notes you don't play.' With the text Morris spares--in the whitespace of her novel--lay the most terrifying revelations. It turns out the most resonant words of Young God are the ones alluded to, never spoken. --Kevin Nguyen


From Booklist


In her first novel, Morris breaks the bones of traditional prose and resets them to serve her raw protagonist, Nikki. At 13, Nikki has survived a troubled childhood in the Carolinas as the daughter of drug traffickers. In fact, her father used to be the most important pusher in the county. After an abrupt tragedy and its aftermath forces Nikki to once more rely on his support, she finds herself being groomed as his replacement. But Nikki resists anyone else's definition of her or her role in the world, and soon she has managed to claim her own power, which she feels is like that of God'the power over pleasure, pain, life, death, and everything in between. Whether it's her body or her brains she must marshal to keep control, Nikki isn't afraid to bruise, break, or bleed. Morris' spare language and short chapters (some only a sentence) serve to support the captivating, unpredictable personality of her intense young narrator, making this a novel fans of finely made fiction will fly through before they've even blinked. --Amber Peckham


Review


This book is so clean and dirty: thirteen-year-old Nikki's nipples pop like buttons; Kool Kings come in a hard box; white goo tastes a little salty but mostly like nothing. The best dreams are of nothing. Except that it is not nothing. It is charged white space: These pages happen to you and now you're awakening, groping groggily to reconstruct. Get mixed up by it. Enter the single-wide and find some ecstasy with Katherine Faw Morris. (
Richard Hell)


About the Author


Katherine Faw Morris was born in northwest North Carolina. She lives in Brooklyn w