Everybody Sees the Ants (by A.S. King)

In many ways the test of true authorship is a writer’s second published work. If the first is good, that could just be a fluke, or it could be a genuine attestation of talent which then ought to be affirmed by that Hard Second Book.  And if that 2^nd work is really the touchstone for all other work of an author, then A.S. King has her work cut out for her. Topping a book like Please Ignore Vera Diet, Michael L. Printz Award and praised by almost everyone who read it,  is not an easy thing to accomplish. For the cat it’s a book that is very – *very* – high up the List of Ultimate YA Novels. Amy King did the clever thing with Everybody Sees the Ants: she showed enough (stylistic and other) similarities to Vera Dietz to lure her fans, yet didn’t take the easy way out and added a few historical and other layers and came up with an almost universal story about bullying.