MORE PRAISE FOR SUBDUCTION:
With dreamlike, salt-water-laced prose that feels born of the Salish Sea, Kristen Millares Young’s Subduction lyrically examines relationships strained and forged by place and belonging. Intelligently addressing womanhood, community, lust, and loss, this is a novel as deep as it is intoxicating, as intricate as it is powerful. Like Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Subduction is a novel to be celebrated for both its poetry and wisdom.
—Sharma Shields, author of The Cassandra
Kristen Millares Young’s Subduction is the powerful debut novel from a writer that comes to us fully formed. 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.
—Robert Lopez, author of Good People, Kamby Bolongo Mean River, Part of the World, All Back Full, and Asunder
Kristen Millares Young’s Subduction is a taut, atmospheric tale that gave me what I hope for in a novel: characters that I can care about, in a place that seems real, with stakes that really matter. This is an enormously impressive debut. I’ll eagerly await more from this writer.
—Steve Yarbrough: PEN/Faulkner finalist, winner of a Richard Wright Award and a California Book Award. The Unmade World, The Realm of Last Chances, The End of California, Prisoners of War.
Subduction will give you a sense of life lived in the most remote corner of the lower 48, the Makah reservation in Washington State. The ever-changing Pacific Ocean, the emerald forests, the geoduck clams, and the scruffy sea-scoured dwellings are merely the foundation of Kristen Millares Young’s suspenseful, atmospheric first novel. The characters leap off the page and into your heart. I wanted to swallow the story whole, and I was happy to know it would take time to savor it. An auspicious debut!
—Patricia Henley, National Book Award finalist, Hummingbird House, In the River Sweet, and Other Heartbreaks
“Love is a kind of home,” Kristen Millares Young writes in Subduction. But in the world of this beautifully written novel, home is also a place of secrets, murder, and loss. A tale of taking and giving, resistance and surrender, Subduction raises troubling, provocative questions about our struggle to belong.
—Samuel Ligon, Miller Cane, Among the Dead and Dreaming, Safe in Heaven Dead
Set in the Pacific Northwest, Subduction is a lyrical forest of storytelling rooted in indigenous voices and invaded by those who would steal the tongues and hearts of the ones they love while bartering and betraying the idea of belonging to a land, a birthright, and a family. When you read Kristen Millares Young’s words, you understand how it is we can steal, can betray, can love.
—Shawn Wong, Homebase and American Knees
Subduction introduces a welcome new voice in Kristen Millares Young, here telling a taut, fraught story of two people who meet and engage in circumstances that surprise. Both have lived but are seeking to live yet more fully, even as they’re beset by their pasts. Whether the way to such realization is with the other is a core part of this vividly written story. Set on Makah Nation land, part of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, Subduction is a searching exploration of historic legacies in the present day. The result: a book of reckoning, full-heartedly told.
—Rick Simonson, Elliott Bay Book Company
"...the book accomplishes something that only the best literature can: It asks the reader to wonder, and to reflect, and to ask crucial questions about society and identity. And it does so in a deeply entertaining and moving story." —Sarah Neilson, The Seattle Times
"...lyrical and atmospheric debut..."—Kirkus Reviews
"Subduction invites the reader into the daily life and ecology of this community with astounding accuracy and respect. From the store in town, to Hobuck Beach, Young’s delicate yet commanding grasp of place paints a believable landscape with a handful of real-to-life characters—none sensationalized nor trivialized."—Jessica Gigot, Empty Mirror
"Subduction is a marvelous collision of people and their emotional landscapes, and much like the geologic action the title refers to, this activity is messy, violent, and natural—as natural as all humans are beneath their wants and needs, their masks and their cultures. And that is the beauty of Young’s novel: while it presents us with the ongoing problematics of cultural sensitivity and awareness and agency, it also reminds us that within these zones are ordinary people, as complicated as the weather and as simple as spirit animals bearing clear messages."—Douglas Cole, Rain Taxi Review of Books
"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, from his interview with Kristen in The Believer Magazine
FEATURES
INTERVIEWS
From the Back Cover
"It wasn't through luck, or through basic attunement to the human condition, that Kristen Millares Young, a non-Native writer, created characters that rang so true for me, a Cowlitz (Indigenous, though, I must be clear, non-Makah) academic. She achieved this effect by putting time into making relationships...Subduction is the result of deep listening to others and to the writer's own process, and of letting something take as long as it takes." - The Rumpus
"Kristen Millares Young's first book is about family ties, bent but not broken, and what time forgets and forgives." - Women's Review of Books
About the Author
Kristen Millares Young is a journalist, essayist, and author of the novel Subduction, named a staff pick by the Paris Review and called “whip-smart” by the Washington Post, “a brilliant debut” by the Seattle Times, and “utterly unique and important” by Ms. Magazine. Winner of Nautilus and IPPY awards, Subduction was shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and named a finalist for two International Latino Book Awards and Foreword Indies Book of the Year. Her essays, book reviews, and investigations appear in the Washington Post, the Guardian, Literary Hub, and the anthologies Advanced Creative Nonfiction, Latina Outsiders, and Alone Together, winner of a 2021 Washington State Book Award. A former Prose Writer-in-Residence at Hugo House, she is the editor of Seismic: Seattle, City of Literature, a finalist for a 2021 Washington State Book Award. Kristen was the researcher for the New York Times team that produced “Snow Fall,” which won a Pulitzer Prize. She was the 2023 Distinguished Visiting Writer for Seattle University and the University of Washington Bothell Master of Fine Arts program.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The shore pulled away. Froth churned from its feet to hers. The engines hummed through her bones.
From the aft deck, Claudia looked back toward the city they made home. She searched the skyline for places they had been happy—the top of the space needle, a waterfront park, the Ferris wheel—until her westward passage split the horizon into expanses of gray, demarcated into sea and sky by hue alone.
Puget Sound opened in fathoms below the ferry.
Claudia left town without saying her goodbyes. Seattle was a small world. Movers must have swarmed her house to clear out Andrew’s belongings in the space of one morning. The neighbors would have seen.
What had they seen? She couldn’t bring herself to ask whether her sister had been on site to supervise, and Claudia hid her phone in case someone felt like sending unsolicited glimpses—of Maria deciding what to take, practicing wifeliness. Slipping Andrew a kiss for courage as the first box was packed. Claudia pictured Maria’s thick curls, her narrow shoulders, her rounded hips. Birthing hips.
The broadcaster’s voice echoed through the loudspeakers, cautioning passengers about unknown items and suspicious activity.
It was cowardly of Andrew not to deliver the news in person. Worse still, Maria. Did they think she would handle it poorly? That she was dangerous?
Listening to the roar of the props, Claudia saw what her fate might have been—her body lying in the bathtub, blue and bloated. Afloat. Her stomach twisted. It was more than she could take—or forgive. They know what they are doing, she thought. Yet they think I deserve it.
