Fallout by Ellen Hopkins

Title: Fallout
Author: Ellen Hopkins
Publisher: Simon and Schuster/Margaret K. McElderry Books
Release Date: September 14th, 2010
Pages: 665 pages (hardback)
How I Got the Book: Bought it.

Nineteen years after Kristina Snow met the monster--crank--her children are reeling form the consequences of her decisions. Instead of one big, happy family, they are a desperate tangle of scattered lives united by anger, doubt, and fear.

A predisposition to addiction and a sense of emptiness where a mother's love should be leads all three down the road of their mother's notorious legacy. Sex, drugs, alcohol, abuse--there is more of Kristina in her children than they would ever like to believe. But when the thread that ties them together brings them face-to-face, they'll discover something powerful in each other and in themselves--the trust, the hope, and the courage to begin to break the cycle.

Fallout is bestselling author Ellen Hopkins's riveting conclusion to her trilogy begun by Crank and Glass. It is a revelation and a testament to the harsh reality that addiction is never just one person's problem.

Review:

Taking place about nineteen years after the conclusion of Glass, Fallout picks the story back up in the eyes of three of her children: Hunter, still living in Reno with his grandparents and longing to know who his father is; Autumn, an OCD-inflicted teen living in Texas with her father's family and knowing nothing of her mother or that side of the family; and Summer, a girl torn between two boys and living in the foster care system in California. All three long for love and are tied together by one person: Kristina Snow. Her children are more like her than they would prefer and as this novel shows you, addiction destroys more people than just the addict.

This time around, we leave Kristina's point of view and are spread between three narrators, all children of hers by different men. Just as all of Hopkins's books are, Fallout is written in free-verse poetry that range from simple to purposeful, some arrangements revealing the inner thoughts of the section's narrator and some making shapes relevant to the passage. Part of what makes Hopkins's books so powerful is this free verse she uses. If put in plain prose like in most books, their power would certainly take a beating, though there would still be power coming from what's being written.

All three of our narrators--angry Hunter, OCD Autumn, and cynical Summer--are rather unlikable, but my favorite of the three is definitely Autumn. There was just something so vulnerable about her, probably coming from being a loner and not knowing many people beyond her grandfather and aunt, that made me like her. Some of what she said and did later in the book kind of made me lose some of that fondness, but she's only human. Summer was the most interesting of the narrators due to her cynicism and trip through the foster care system. Hunter? Well, I didn't like Hunter that much or have much to say about him. He's a pretty big sleaze.

The narration had a habit of changing to the next child just when it got interesting for one of them and that became frustrating quickly. All this switching made the pacing slow to a crawl at points. However, all this changing does give them all their time in the spotlight and show just how similar all three are to Kristina. As for Kristina herself, she's still a mess and still into crystal meth, but it isn't as bad as it once was. If it were, there's no way she would come near any of her family. Twenty years of drugs and jail have changed her and she's not completely the Kristina readers may know, but it is her. Curious about some of the minor characters, like Trey's cousin Brad and Brad's daughters LaTreya and Devon from Glass or Kristina's ex Chase? Thanks to newspaper clippings between chapters, you'll find out.

While I liked the ending of Fallout, I wish that it didn't end with the group realization at the Christmas dinner and the fake news article. We just saw three siblings who barely knew each other finally coming together and seeing their mother again. The article tells us all of the children now live in the same house. Couldn't it be extended a little to show us how the siblings interact together? We only saw their introduction to each other and then it was over. We never got a handle on how they felt about one another. I think this small extension really would have made this book shine.

If you haven't already picked up these books, do it. Read them and be horrified. Have a problem reading about drug addicts or drugs in general? Me too, surprisingly. Getting around that discomfort to read the Crank trilogy will be worth it. It's a bit of a shame that this is the end because there is still so much more to the story, but readers will be able to piece together the future themselves if needed.

4 stars!

What am I reading next?: Heist Society by Ally Carter

Glass by Ellen Hopkins

Title: Glass
Author: Ellen Hopkins
Publisher: Simon and Schuster/Margaret K. McElderry Books
Release Date: August 21st, 2007
Pages: 681 pages (paperback)
How I Got the Book: Bought it.

Crank. Glass. Ice. Crystal. Whatever you call it, it's all the same: a monster. Kristina thinks she can control it. Now with a baby to care for, she is determined to be the one deciding when and how much, the one calling the shots. But the monster is strong, and before she knows it, Kristina is back in its grip... and it won't let go.

Review:

Three months after her son Hunter's birth, Kristina is going insane and stir-crazy without crank and the freedom to do as she pleases. Leaving her baby boy Hunter in the dust, she jumps right back into her old habits and gets even worse. This time around, the monster doesn't want to let her go. Taking her everywhere from her own home to the arms of a fellow addict to that fellow addict's cousin, Kristina's in deeper than ever before. Still deep under Bree's influence, Kristina might only be stopped this time by jail or death.

After a quick, slightly dull recap of what happened to Kristina in Crank, we jump to her current situation and experience it as she goes stir-crazy. If you thought you saw a downward spiral in the last book, you haven't seen anything yet. At least she lived in her own home the entire time in the last book! Everything gets that much grittier. The drug use is heavier, the drug dealing happens more often, and sex is everywhere. Parents probably don't want the little ones seeing this book. As out-of-this-world Kristina's life gets this time around, the knowledge of just how close to truth this novels is constantly hangs over the head of readers.

Kristina's character definitely takes a beating this time around and I don't mean just figuratively. As soon as she's back on meth, it takes over worse than before and it's really kind of sad. Everything lies forgotten while Kristina's high: her family, her future, and even her baby Hunter, the little boy who only wants to love his mother and be loved in return. In her quest to find met and love, Kristina ends up neglecting the one person who's there and ready to love her if only she'll be around and love him the way she should as his mother. Her narration of her life's twists and turns are often supported by the creative arrangements of this free verse novel. She'll say one thing and when reading between the lines, the good girl trapped inside speaks the truth.

The romance between Kristina and Trey is not a healthy one at all, but it's incredibly interesting and hard to look away from, like a fight in a school hallway or a car crash on the side of the road. They fight, they make up, they apparently have earth-shattering sex on a regular basis, and they are sure in their love for each other, which is probably helped by all the meth they're doing together. Every so often, I wondered how their love affair would fare if the meth was gone and it was just Kristina and Trey, not Kristina, Trey, and the monster. Just how much does meth influence how they feel for one another?

Knowing that this story is loosely based off what happened to the Hopkins' daughter gives the novel a strange sort of sense about it. How much of what is written is fiction, something the author made up for Kristina's story? How much of it is something that happened to Cristal, or a fight that happened between Hopkins and Cristal? Imagining that any of this happened to the author and her family is... There's no way to describe it, really. Powerful isn't enough of a word to express it.

The one catch in this book happens early on, when Leigh and her girlfriend Heather come for a visit and to be at Hunter's baptism. Kristina is so utterly focused on the fact that Leigh likes girls that it drives me bonkers, to use an aged phrase. Every other thought when Leigh is around or even mentioned seems to be "Leigh is a lesbian, Lesbian Leigh, lesbian lesbian lesbian lesbian lesbian..." I get it! There's no need to repeat it a thousand times! Really, I've got no problem with Leigh being a lesbian. My problem lies with Kristina's refusal to tell us once and leave it at that. No, she's got to repeat it a thousand times in however many pages Leigh is around.

Still as terrifyingly real and engrossing as the first book in the trilogy, Glass gets a lower rating only because of that whole repetitive "Leigh is a lesbian" thing. Books aren't going to win my favor over being repetitive like that. The final book Fallout is on my shelf, but I have a few other books to read first. It's a good thing exams are coming up--I'll have something to read while everyone else works or isn't there!

4 stars!

What am I reading next?: The Demon Trapper's Daughter by Jana Oliver

Crank by Ellen Hopkins

(Yeah, I'm going to normal titles now. The corny ones cause my brain much pain when I try to think them up and they're just plain silly. I'm nearly seventeen now! I suppose it's time to grow up. I apologize if you liked them.)

Title: Crank
Author: Ellen Hopkins
Publisher: Simon Pulse
Release Date: October 5th, 2004
Pages: 537 pages (paperback)
How I Got the Book: Borrowed it from my Newspaper teacher

Kristina Georgia Snow is the perfect daughter: gifted high school junior, quiet, never any trouble. But on a trip to visit her absentee father, Kristina disappears and Bree takes her place. Bree is the exact opposite of Kristina--she's fearless.

Through a boy, Bree meets the monster: crank. And what begins as a wild, ecstatic ride turns into a struggle through hell for her mind, her soul--her life.

Review:

Kristina Snow has only ever been a good girl. Good grades, good behavior, never associated with the wrong crowd--she doesn't take after her drug addict father at all. Or does she? When she goes to visit him due to a court order, her alter ego Bree, a girl who is fearless and her own person, comes out to play and together, they take on the monster: crank, or meth, or any of the million names you can call it. When she returns home to Reno, the addiction she picked up in Albuquerque comes back with her. School, her old friends, and her family suddenly become unimportant to her--all that matters is crank: the connections she must make to get it, the rush she gets from it, and the people she meets because of it.

Before August, I had no idea who Ellen Hopkins was and had not heard of her books. At that time, I heard about the incident where she was uninvited from the Teen Lit Fest in Humble, Texas because a librarian and some parents protested it. I wanted to see what they were fussing about, but it took me until now to get ahold of one of her books because it lingered in the back of my mind. I can now say I have read an Ellen Hopkins book and plan to read many more.

The verse prose of the book could put a reader off at first, but the story takes hold fast and the form it comes to the reader in no longer matters. Personally, I believe that this story has more impact written in the poetic form it appears in than in the conventional form of most novels. The reader is forced to pay attention to exactly what they're reading because the form changes all over the place. This unusual form (which takes up much less page space than the usual novel) and the fast pace make Crank a novel someone can dive right into and not surface from until they read the last page.

Not only is Ellen Hopkins a wonderful writer, but she is also a wonderful storyteller: using experience gained in her own life from when her daughter was addicted to crank, she tells the tragic story of a girl who lost herself to drugs in about six months and makes the reader care. Her descent from good child to drug user to drug dealer is a terrifying one and despite not ever being an addict herself, Hopkins captures Kristina's thoughts perfectly and if I am to believe other reviewers, accurately; I have seen many readers who formerly used crank/meth comment on just how realistic the text is. It appears that Hopkins had many talks with her daughter about what her experience was like.

People who demand that every little thing is detailed, down to the stains on the carpet and the poster on the wall in a room, might be annoyed by this book. All of the detail is concentrated inwards on Kristina's experience with crank and what it is turning her into. Despite the lack of details in most situations (one of the few settings detailed well is Kristina's room), the scenes are easily pictured within the mind. Kristina spouts just enough about what is around her for the reader to put the picture together and that is it. Little else is said because why would she care about that? She's more concerned with the drugs.

Reading Crank, I wondered what this kind of novel might have done for a former friend of mine named Shelby. We were best friends when we were younger and then she went away to a private school for eight years. The next time I saw her, she was hooked on all sorts of drugs due to her family, all of whom are a special kind of messed up. I heard her talk about doing ecstasy, just as Kristina does in this book, acid, she smoked marijuana at our bus stop (which is pretty much my mailbox) one morning before school... She even overdosed at school once and was in the hospital for a few days. Sixteen years old and a drug addict, just like Kristina. She recently moved away and we haven't kept contact. How many children has this author and this book helped? Who knows. Maybe if she'd had a book like this, it could have helped her too.

Now I'm wondering what took me so long to read an Ellen Hopkins book. I wish I could go pick up the sequels Glass and Fallout right now, but it's Christmas and I don't exactly have the money at the moment. Good thing my birthday is so close! After that, I'll advance onto Ellen's other novels, written in the same prose form and tackling the same issues. Even if books about drugs make you uncomfortable the way they way they do me, get your hands on this book and read it if you haven't already done so. The time you spend reading this book with be nothing but worth it.

5 stars!

What am I reading next?: I have no clue. I have no new books left and I don't plan to start any old ones since I'll be getting more books in two days. My next post will be about what books you can expect me to review in the future.