Book Review Seven: Crank

Crank by Ellen Hopkins, published by Simon Pulse.

This may be my last Ellen Hopkins book for a while. Unless they put one on the strip shelf at work, or I find a decent cheap used copy. I'm not saying this is the last I'll read, just that I think I need a break. They're good, they're powerful and beautiful. However, they're also overwhelming. I may want to get away from my boring routine called life, but I don't want to do it by getting hooked on drugs or being abused. That's a change I would like to avoid, and unfortunately that's what happens when I read her books. I get so involved in the character's struggle (in this case Kristina/Bree) that I forget about Michaela. I become the abused. I become the addict. I become obsessed with the monster. I would prefer some time off from feeling like I'm stumbling, tumbling, crashing, burning, caught in a pit with wild wolves...

So, back to the story! Crank is the first installment in the Kristina/Bree trip with the monster (or crystal meth). If you can remember, I read Glass a while back and that was slightly confusing in the beginning because it followed Kristina's journey after Crank. Well, here I am with the full scoop and I have to say, it didn't disappoint. I expected more craziness and debauchery (I know, I know, she falls head over heels for crystal meth, loses herself in the high, constantly skips classes, sneaks out, lies to her family all to support this drug habit and I expected more? But if you read Glass it makes Bree look like a good schoolgirl in Crank). Kristina's first dive with the monster happens when she's on a visit with her biological estranged father in New Mexico. She falls for a boy there who introduces her to the monster, to Bree, and to love.

Through the course of the novel she becomes hooked, scores new connections, suffers heartbreak of the small and the volatile. She is violated, she is a willing victim, she is fearless and scared to death. She is in control, she is so far gone she doesn't know who she is anymore. This novel will take you on a journey and it will grab hold of you. Kristina will force you to confront her demons, which in turn will start a spiral of questions and doubts about everything you ever thought you knew about addicts. It's true, they're seduced by pleasure, by the adrenaline, by the feeling of being alive. But unless you can hear it firsthand or feel it yourself, I doubt you'll be able to understand. That's how I felt before this novel. I just couldn't comprehend. I just wondered, "so you feel good, what's the big deal?"

Here's an excerpt to get my point across:

Ecstasy Is Hard To Describe

It's like falling

softly floating

into a on your deciphering

pool of back codes

crystal circular in the

mountain beneath clouds

water vibrant spinning

sky dizzy

fast.

It isn't at all like going

clear throwing

out of yourself hallucinating

your in front black

head of a widows

lunatic runaway and black

mad train helicopters

insane behind you

crazy.

It's a lot more like jumping

into accepting

your own past forgiving

brain, failures yourself

ferreting freeing and those

what's self you love

inside destructive and even

demons those you

despise.

(pg. 428).

I'm grateful that I now understand a little more. If anything, I realize you can't fully understand it until you try it, but let Kristina's story be a message: you can't just try crystal meth and be done with it. It's a monster and it lets itself into your head. It becomes a part of you and you can't just escape or push that part away. You are now part of a life-long constant struggle for inner control and yes, sometimes you win. And sometimes the monster does.

edited to say: I have tried like five times to get that poem to look exactly as it does in the novel and for some reason I just can't get it to stay indented. Try and read them as 3 columns going vertically not horizontally. If you know how I can fix it, please let me know!

Book Review Two: Burned

Burned by Ellen Hopkins, published by Simon Pulse.

I was worried that this novel would remind me too much of Glass, and while the format was similar the storyline was completely different. This book was disturbing in a completely new way. The narrator, Pattyn Von Stratten, is a Mormon teenage girl who is struggling with her religious view. She isn't sure if she believes everything the church says anymore. She finds contradictions in her every-day life, mostly from her abusive father, and questions why she has deep desires if they are sinful. I felt bad that normal things, like coffee, were temptations for her.

The main problem occurs when she goes too far with a boy she likes at school. She learns something about the students in her class, mainly that they can't be trusted and she is further removed from the social stratosphere than she previously believed, that she has no one else to turn to, and that she is surprising even herself with the limits she starts to test. What would be typical for any American teenage girl is a life-altering decision for Pattyn. It will make girls across America re-evaluate their own decisions, their faith, and feel connected at last to a girl who believes in "forever love."

It's a beautiful tale, even if the format is less than unique and not as gripping as Glass' dance with the monster. I liked the poem form even less in this novel because it didn't have enough idiosyncratic details. There weren't any particular lines that stuck out to me or that sang their way to my heart. I appreciated the relationship between Pattyn and the second boy she falls for, it was moving and heat-warming and everything you expect a first love to be. However, it could have been painted just as beautifully, if not more, in prose. Perhaps it's just me, but I feel that 500 pages of poetry is too much. It begs to be read like a novel and the artistic value becomes lost in the plot and characters. There weren't any specific poems that stood out to me, thus disappointing me in the ability of Hopkins' craft. She really impressed me in Glass and unfortunately that quality didn't shine through in Burned.

From an objective standpoint, the ending to this novel was probably brilliant. It suggested the chaos that high school drama and gossip can start. It pointed the finger at the effect of domestic abuse on America's teens. It screamed messages about love and faith, what to do when you have nothing left, and how control is a fleeting thing. From a personal standpoint, I hated it. I want happily ever afters. If I wanted sad endings I would read the newspaper, I read fiction to bring some hope into my life, to think about true love and fairy tales and "what ifs." I want to believe there's something more to this life than just wake-up-go-to-work-cook-dinner-go-to-bed. And while the faith that Pattyn eventually discovers may not be in God, the love she nurtures could be his byproduct, and therefore it made me want it to last forever. After all "forever love" doesn't die.

Book Review One: Glass

Glass by Ellen Hopkins, published by Simon Pulse.

I thought I would be speechless by the time I finished this book. However, I've found that I have a lot to say about it. I couldn't put it down. It's 681 pages and I read it in 2 days when I wasn't working. Which is really good since I've been spending a majority of my downtime just watching tv shows on my computer. So hey, it made me productive. It brought me back into the reading game. It made me want to write. But it did not make me want to do crystal meth.

If you're a friend of mine you probably know that I joke about doing crystal meth a lot. I can't stand drugs, don't have a tolerance for people who do them, and yes, can be judgmental about it. But I watch a ton of intervention and I paid attention in health class so I just don't understand why someone would do that to her body. I've joked that it helps you lose weight, which it does do for the narrator in this story, yet it completely destroys her in the process.

I don't know how to explain this format any better than it being a poetic structure. It takes the format of poems although most often it sounds like the narrator is just thinking to herself or arguing with herself. More like Kristina arguing with Bree, her personality when she's on the "monster." The monster is what she calls Meth (crystal, crank, glass all being other names for it). The poem structure will sway you into her perspective. You'll feel like you're Kristina. You'll feel confused and lost. You'll feel like you aren't rational and you're hooked in to something you can't control. I know it sounds ridiculous, but reading it made me feel like I was on meth, that I was a horrible mother and daughter and I had spun out of control. It was all I could do to put the book down and take a step back. I had to remember who I was versus who Kristina was.

As good as the poetry is, and it is helpful in constructing a believable narrator and story, I was troubled by the line breaks. There were many that were unsophisticated, such as ending a line with or, to, one, a, do, to, for, and on. However, most of the poems had a clear construction as can be seen by the image of the poem: one is in the shape of a G and ends with "uilty," or by what words are indented and which aren't:

"Walking with the Monster

Life

was radical

right after I met

the monster.

Later, life

became

harder,

complicated.

Ultimately,

a living

hell,

like swimming

against a riptide,

walking

the wrong

direction in the fast

lane of the freeway,

waking

from sweetest

dreams to find yourself

in the middle of a

nightmare."

(Glass, Hopkins, pg 1).

As you can see, the middle lines repeat the message of the entire poem, yet they do it in a simpler, more direct form. It was interesting to view what little poems could form out of their larger counterparts and to see if they agreed with the main message Kristina was trying to convey. So even though the poems were easy to read, and the book could be read in its entirety in a small amount of time, the smaller poems, the conflict with Bree, the images portrayed by the poems, all forced me, the reader, to spend more time on the page. I couldn't just take it at face value; there was too much to digest.

Unfortunately when I got the book I didn't realize that it was the second part to an already established story about Kristina: Crank, by Ellen Hopkins. I also didn't realize that it was her daughter's story I was reading until I had already started the book. None of this was especially needed information to appreciate Glass, however it does make me respect Hopkins more for not only choosing to write this painful story, but choosing to do so in such an intense and beautiful manner. I'm looking forward to reading more of her books in the future, and also to meeting her in May at the Festival.

P.S. I wouldn't recommend this book for younger readers. It's a sensitive subject and one that should be read with understanding and maturity. There are a lot of intense and emotional topics including graphic and suggestive imagery. However, I would recommend this to anyone who needs to understand why someone becomes addicted to methamphetamines and how they can continue to love and support them.