The League of Utah Writers has a community book club, where each month, members are invited to read a selected book and join in discussions about it with their local chapters. The League also organizes a discussion panel where authors in the same genre/space as the chosen book get to gab about it over Zoom.
This month, I was invited to participate on the Zoom panel for Rotters by Daniel Kraus. Here’s a little bit about the book:
Grave-robbing. What kind of monster would do such a thing? It’s true that Leonardo da Vinci did it, Shakespeare wrote about it, and the resurrection men of nineteenth-century Scotland practically made it an art. But none of this matters to Joey Crouch, a sixteen-year-old straight-A student living in Chicago with his single mom. For the most part, Joey’s life is about playing the trumpet and avoiding the daily humiliations of high school.
Everything changes when Joey’s mother dies in a tragic accident and he is sent to rural Iowa to live with the father he has never known, a strange, solitary man with unimaginable secrets. At first, Joey’s father wants nothing to do with him, but once father and son come to terms with each other, Joey’s life takes a turn both macabre and exhilarating.
Daniel Kraus’s masterful plotting and unforgettable characters make Rotters a moving, terrifying, and unconventional epic about fathers and sons, complex family ties, taboos, and the ever-present specter of mortality.
This was such a fun YA novel. Joey’s new high school is honestly more terrifying than the grave robbing, especially his biology teacher. It’s beautifully descriptive, and Joey’s anxiety yanked me into the story right away. I definitely recommend it.
If you’d like to see the longer discussion, you can check it out here: