“The title of the book refers to the geological phenomenon of one tectonic plate sinking under the influence of another, during which both subsumed and overriding plates are wracked by distortion and disruption. In Young’s novel, the answer to which is which is left beautifully unclear.”

—  The Paris Review staff pick

“Gorgeously, toughly written, this book dares to be open-ended yet leaves readers with a satisfying sense of how life really unfolds. Cultural clash matters here, but personal differences and desires even more. For any fiction reader looking beyond the obvious.”

—  Library Journal, starred review

“In this utterly unique and important first novel, Young examines themes of love, intrusion, loss, community and trust against a backdrop of a Makah reservation in the Pacific Northwest.”

— Ms. Magazine named SUBDUCTION a top 2020 Feminist Book

“Subduction is a gritty novel in which floundering people find hope and understanding where they least expect it.”

— Foreword Reviews five star review

“Young’s debut novel is a spiraling exploration into the complexities of betrayal and uncertainty, scattered like loose rubble beneath one’s feet…Subduction’s plot proceeds with the forward motion of a river’s flow, at times gentle and meandering, then suddenly voracious, even dangerous. Like the Pacific Northwest landscape Young describes, the romantic relationship that sparks between Claudia and Peter is dark and mystical, a connection forged from the seed of desperation and unimaginable pain, scattered with moments of unexpected sunshine.”

— The Rumpus review

“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 conversation with Elissa Washuta

“I wanted to swallow the story whole.”

— BOMB Magazine conversation with Patricia Henley

“What follows is a haunting work about intimacy, tradition, and trust — and a thoroughly lived-in portrait of a place and a community.”

— Vol. I Brooklyn conversation with Tobias Carroll

“full of beautiful and lyrical prose grounded in the land and seascape of the Northwest coast…if you’re nerdy about place-based writing and like to give the field of anthropology the side-eye, this is a book for you.”

— Danielle Geller (Diné) in High Country News

“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 

“In Young’s lyrical and atmospheric debut, two damaged outsiders, estranged from their families and cultures, struggle to discover where they really belong.”

— Kirkus Reviews

“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.”

— The Believer

“Subduction portrays the complex experience of racial grief that results from being severed from our cultural identities. It is messy to find human connection as a cultural outsider marred by the complexities of betrayal. With Subduction, veteran investigative journalist Young takes on the ethics of storytelling across racial identities.”

— Los Angeles Review of Books conversation with Shin Yu Pai

“a human story of need and loss and recovery…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.”

— Rain Taxi Review of Books

“It’s a book, like its name suggests, about powerful frictions. About sex and race and culture and nature and memory. About the past sliding beneath the present, until every so often things start to tremble. But it’s also about stories—who tells them and how.”

— Seattle Met’s essential Seattle reading list

“It is also an homage to the resiliency of place-based people. Transcending the cultural facets of this unique story, one can’t help but share in a collective feeling of hope after reading this novel. Not blind, ecstatic, hope, but real confidence that as one life fades away another, possibly better, version of ourselves is possible. We are also reminded, in this remote and mystical corner, that the living, breathing world around may hold all the answers we need.”

— Empty Mirror

“In the acknowledgments to the novel, Young opens with the thought that “I write to improve the quality of ideas available to our society” and ends with the idea that “To love a writer is no easy thing.” Writers tell the stories, keep one eye on the past and one eye on the story they weave to connect themselves and others to the painful pasts that not everyone can escape.”

— Ploughshares

“Part anthropological study, part philosophical interrogation, and all parts brilliant (actionable) storytelling: an examination of what happens when immigrants become settlers, and native land dwellers become itinerant travelers.”

— Seventh Wave Magazine conversation with Joyce Chen

“This novel reminds me of Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, particularly in how its imagery is both evocative of this rich, watery Northwest location (Subduction on the sea, Housekeeping inland)…breathtaking sentences throughout.”

—Moss conversation with Sharma Shields

“The pulse of our conversation kept returning to community, connections, voices. Afterward, I kept thinking how every story is really an origin story.”

— Seattle Arts & Lectures conversation with Gabriela Denise Frank

“Young sets her story — featuring betrayal, murder, ancient legacies and steamy bad-idea sex — on the Makah Indian Reservation at Neah Bay, where a Latina anthropologist has fled her own culture to embed herself in another. Young’s poetic language evokes this damp Northwest place so vividly that moss seems to sprout from the pages.”

— Crosscut

“Precisely as in real life, Subduction and its characters navigate complicated truths that often don’t settle easily into alignment with everyday reality.”

— The Nervous Breakdown conversation with Margaret Malone

“A collision of cultures and motives as Claudia and Peter use each other for their own gain, Peter to learn about his father and Claudia to learn details of Makah culture not meant for outsiders. Both are dealing with a sense of loss and displacement in their lives; their characters’ motivations feel questionable, disturbing, and incredibly real.” 

— The Daily

“Young’s prose feels effortless.”

— PageBoy Magazine

I make novels to share that which society would rather keep hidden. In revision, I discover and reveal my true concerns, refracted through characters with thoughts in contradiction to my own.

— The Millions conversation with Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum

Fiction is a powerful prism for examining such fraught truths. Through my protagonists, I studied the lies we tell so we don’t have to change.

— “What to Read When You Don’t Know If You Can Go Home Again,” a Subduction-related reading list in The Rumpus