Impulse by Ellen Hopkins

Impulse by Ellen Hopkins

In this gripping novel in verse, Hopkins tells what happens to three suicidal teenagers who meet in a clinic for “troubled youth” in Nevada.  First there’s Conner, who seems to have the perfect life if you don’t look too closely.  He lives in a mansion in an exclusive part of town and is very popular at school. Along with this, however, he has parents with impossibly high expectations who are always comparing him to his “perfect” twin sister Cara.  Then we meet Tony, a street kid who’s been in the juvenile detention system since he was a young child, but readers won’t learn why until much later in the book.  We just find out that he’s gay and been a prostitute on and off just to survive.  Lastly is Vanessa, the beautiful girl with a secret so dark the only way she believes she can relieve her pain is by cutting herself.  These three patients slowly become friends as they find they have more and more in common with each other.  Sharing their pasts is excruciating, but carefully they reveal their darkest mysteries to each other, learning to trust and love in the process.

This book is full of bleak topics: sexual abuse, self-mutilation, drug abuse, parental neglect, mental illness and suicide. Like all of Hopkins’ books, the author has done her research, and presents her characters in a realistic, if depressing fashion.  I found this book engaging, yet sad.  It didn’t really matter that I read it after I read Perfect, as there was only one character in common.  I would highly recommend this to teen readers who like realistic fiction and fans of Hopkins’ other titles.

Click HERE to see the review of the companion novel Perfect.

 

Perfect by Ellen Hopkins

Perfect by Ellen Hopkins

I haven’t read any Ellen Hopkins titles for awhile, and I forgot how emotionally wrenching they can be.  This one was certainly no exception in terms of teenagers trying to make their way in a hostile world.  Like she often does, the writer uses free verse poetry to tell four different yet overlapping stories in alternating chapters .  Cara is coping with the suicide of her twin brother Conner, who finally cracked under their parents’ unreasonable expectations for their perfect off-spring.  For Kendra, being perfect means having the perfect figure and face, even if it requires anorexia and plastic surgery.  Sean want to have the perfect future, which in his mind includes an athletic scholarship to Stanford and Cara as his girlfriend. Andre’s parents are high achievers, a plastic surgeon and an investment banker, and expect him to follow in their footsteps, even though dancing is what makes his heart sing. Here’s how we meet Andre Marcus Kane III:

“Don’t Get Me Wrong

I do understand my parents wanting only

the best for me.

Am one hundred percent tuned to the concept

that life is a hell of a lot more enjoyable

with a fast-flowing

stream of money carrying you along.

I like driving a pricey car, wearing

clothes that feel

like they want to be next to my skin.

I love not having to be a living, breathing

stereotype because

of my color.  Anytime I happen to think

about it, I am grateful to my grandparents

for their vision.  Grateful

to my mom for her smarts, to my dad

for his bald ambition and yes, greed.

Not to mention

his real intuition.  But I’m sick of being

pushed to follow in his footsteps.  Real

estate speculation?

Investment banking?  Neither interests me.

Too much at risk, and when you lose,

you lose major.

I much prefer winning, even if it’s winning

small.  I think more like my grandfather.

Andre Marcus Kane Sr.

Embraced the color of his skin, refused

to let it straightjacket him.  He grew up in

the urban California

nightmare called Oakland, with its rutted

asphalt and crumbling cement and frozen

dreams, all within

sight of sprawling hillside mansions.

I’d look up at those houses, he told

me more than once,

and think to myself, no reason why

that can’t be me, living up there.  No

reason why at all, except

getting sucked into the swamp.”

I loved this book, in fact, it’s one of my favorites from fall 2011.  I think all teens can identify with the issues these four struggle with, even though the characters’ problems are taken to pretty extreme lengths.  I recommend this to all young adult readers, with a  special shout out the the Berkeley High Ellen Hopkins fans!  By the way, this is the companion novel to Hopkins’ earlier title Impulse.

Glimpse

Glimpse by Carol Lynch Williams

Even though Hope and Lizzie were a year apart in age, they had been best friends ever since they could remember. When little sister Hope walks in on Lizzie, fourteen years old, about to shoot herself with a shotgun, her heart  “pounds so much that it hurts.”

“She fingers the

trigger.

Looks up.

My sister.

My sister just looks

up at me.

Touching

the trigger

of that gun.”

Hope can’t understand what could be so terrible that her Lizzie would want to end her life.  She goes back to beginning to start her story, when their father was killed on his motorcycle while out getting medicine. The readers see glimpses of the past, while living in the difficult present time with Hope.  Lizzie is put in a mental hospital for treatment, and Hope must contend with their abusive mother alone, an unscrupulous and exploitative woman who turned to prostitution years ago as means to support her daughters.  The mental hospital’s psychiatrist believes something has happened recently to change Lizzie’s behavior, and the reader learns along with Hope what has happened with Lizzie and how she can “save” her.

I highly recommend this book to fans of realistic teen fiction and  fans of Ellen Hopkins.  You will find it hard to put down once you get started!

Ellen Hopkins Event!!!!

One of Berkeley High’s favorite authors has her latest book coming out this month.  We can even see her, hear her read and chat at one of our local indie bookstores!

Thursday, September 16, 2010 – 7:00pm

A Great Good Place for Books

6120 LaSalle Avenue

Oakland, California 94611

A Great Good Place for Books proudly welcomes Ellen Hopkins as she reads from her new book FALL OUT,  Thursday September 16th at 7:00 pm.  This is the third and final book in the Crank series.  Here’s a description from Goodreads.com:

Hunter, Autumn, and Summer—three of Kristina Snow’s five children—live in different homes, with different guardians and different last names. They share only a predisposition for addiction and a host of troubled feelings toward the mother who barely knows them, a mother who has been riding with the monster, crank, for twenty years.

Hunter is nineteen, angry, getting by in college with a job at a radio station, a girlfriend he loves in the only way he knows how, and the occasional party. He’s struggling to understand why his mother left him, when he unexpectedly meets his rapist father, and things get even more complicated. Autumn lives with her single aunt and alcoholic grandfather. When her aunt gets married, and the only family she’s ever known crumbles, Autumn’s compulsive habits lead her to drink. And the consequences of her decisions suggest that there’s more of Kristina in her than she’d like to believe. Summer doesn’t know about Hunter, Autumn, or their two youngest brothers, Donald and David. To her, family is only abuse at the hands of her father’s girlfriends and a slew of foster parents. Doubt and loneliness overwhelm her, and she, too, teeters on the edge of her mother’s notorious legacy. As each searches for real love and true family, they find themselves pulled toward the one person who links them together—Kristina, Bree, mother, addict. But it is in each other, and in themselves, that they find the trust, the courage, the hope to break the cycle.

Told in three voices and punctuated by news articles chronicling the family’s story, FALLOUT is the stunning conclusion to the trilogy begun by CRANK and GLASS, and a testament to the harsh reality that addiction is never just one person’s problem.

I can’t wait to read this book as I absolutely loved Crank and Glass!  I would recommend this to readers who like realistic fiction and books told in verse.

Identical by Ellen Hopkins

Identical by Ellen Hopkins

If you’ve read any titles by Ellen Hopkins before, you know that she writes her stories in free verse poetry.  At first this bothered me.  But then one of our students told me that she noticed how the shapes the groupings of words and lines made added to the meaning of the words.  Here’s an example:

It isn’t an option,

If you tell

a secret

about someone

you don’t really know,

other people might

listen,

but decide you’re

making it up.  Even if you

happen to know for a fact

it’s true.

Although Raeanne and Kaeleigh are identical twins down to their dimples, they couldn’t be more different.  Raeanne spends her free time with her drug dealing boyfriend, “partying” and having sex in his truck.  In contrast, Kaeleigh is involved with the usual high school extracurricular activities.  Their parents, although successfully involved in Ray’s career as a judge and his re-election campaign, have little time for the girls.  Except for one thing—their father has been sexually abusing Kaeleigh since a terrible car accident years before.  The girls’ story is told in alternating points of view, their voices helping distinguish them from one another.  Life gets harder and harder for the girls, until a frightening event occurs followed by a shocking discovery.

Due to the subject matter, this is a book for mature readers.  Although not perfect, I loved this book and think Hopkins is simply an amazing writer who seems to be able to transport herself into the minds and hearts of young adults.

Crank and Glass

Crank and Glass both by Ellen Hopkins

This is another book I discovered via one of our avid readers. When she told me about the book, at first I wasn’t that enthusiastic, because I’m not a big fan of novels told in verse (free form poetry). But she convinced me to try it anyway, and now I’m so addicted that I just finished my third book by this writer! Both Crank and Glass are about a girl named Kristina.  When Kristina goes to visit her father that she rarely sees, she gets introduced to “the monster,” the highly addictive methamphetamine, sometimes called crystal or crank by users. This is when she discovers “Bree,” her alter ego she who’s the bad girl. It’s the fearless Bree who falls so under the spell of the monster, that she’ll do anything to get more. This book ends with Kristina in a terrible situation, where she must come to terms with her addiction, or completely give up.
Glass picks us where Crank ends. Here is how Kristina/Bree describes her life at the beginning of the book:

“My Mother and Stepfather

Tried to stop me before
it all went completely wrong.
Kristina spent almost a whole
year GUFN–grounded
until further notice.

But Bree was really good
at prying open windows
at night, lying with a straight
face, denying she had
slipped so far downhill.

Nothing slowed me down,
Not losing my virginity
to Brenden’s rape. Not
spending a few days
in juvenile hall…

Pregnant. And Brenden
was the father. Bree considered
abortion. Exorcism. Kristina
understood the baby was not
the demon. His father was.”

Even though she’s a new mother living at home and working at 7-11, Kristina still thinks she can control the monster. She quickly discovers that she can never be in charge if she’s using, but doesn’t have the inner strength to stop using. In fact, she graduates to Glass, a purer and even more addictive form of crank.

I actually liked the second book better than the first. Her character felt more honest, and it was easy to identify with her struggles, even though I’ve never faced these particular problems. Although these books are fiction, they are loosely based on the author’s daughter’s own experiences. This fact, which she tells at the beginning of Crank, made it even more interesting. This books are sort of like Go Ask Alice for our times.

Sold

Sold by Patricia McCormick

This heartbreaking book is about a thirteen-year-old girl who is sold into prostitution by her greedy stepfather. All she knows is her rural village in Nepal, where she is good in math and lives in a small hut. Suddenly she is sold to “become a maid and help support the family,” but instead is transported to the slums of Calcutta. Here Lakshmi is drugged, beaten, and starved until she submits to a life of forced prostitution.

Told in free verse poetry, her story is haunting and sad, but her courage and strength in the face of huge odds against her is amazing. This unforgettable story depicts the tragic plight of sexual slavery in our world today. The writer actually traveled to India and Nepal to interview the girls and women in the sex trade to prepare for writing the book. On her website, McCormick says that the biggest challenge in writing the book was not to let the sadness of the situation overwhelm her.