Crank by Ellen Hopkins
Title: Crank by Ellen Hopkins
Rating: 5/5
Pages: 537
Genre: YA lit/ Problem Novel
Summary (Off Goodreads): 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: I am very wary of reading "problem novels." More often than not, they end with the teenager going through something terrible, whether it be drugs, drinking, or cutting, or an eating disorder, whatever the disease du jour is, and then, by the end of the book, things are magically better and the problem is gone and everyone happy. Honestly, I think that's an insult to people who really go through these problems. So when I picked up Crank on the recommendation of a friend, I was afraid of finding the same thing that you find in all problem novels.
Luckily, Hopkins gave me an amazing, compelling story that manages to avoid most (though not all) common tropes. Kristina is our protagonist. Meek daughter who is a good girl with straight As and always does what she is told. That is, until she goes to visit her estranged father for six weeks. Her father is hopped up on enough drugs and Kristina ends up trying Meth, a drug that drags her in from almost the first moment. In that moment, she almost creates another persona, "Bree."
I actually really liked that Hopkins gave Kristina another personality. It helped show that when you're on drugs, you're the same person without being the same person. It was also interesting because you realized that the people who really cared about her called her Kristina, whereas all those there to drug up with her called her Bree. Chase was a boy she met who actually furthered her addiction at first. Only later do you realize that he's a decent guy who, in some ways, is just as lost as she is. The other thing is that he always calls her Kristina, never Bree.
Kristina falls into the usual patterns of severe addiction. She gets depressed, starts losing her old relationships, her grades start falling, her decisions become poorer and poorer until all she thinks about is where she's going to get her next fix. You realize that her addiction is all consuming, that it gets to a point that she can't function without Meth. And she always thinks that life is amazing and wonderful.
The drugs also cause her to react differently to situations in her life. Kristina meets Brendan, someone who can supply her with drugs. Her need for drugs put her in a bad situation that ended in him raping her. Her way of dealing with this is getting high again, making sure that she stays high. Hopkins does a good job of showing how Meth really effects a person's life. One bad situation lends itself to another because all she can think about is getting high.
Chase is the one that she confesses to, tells everything that happens and then she tries to have sex with Chase. This is really where you see that, while Chase may be encouraging her habit, he really does care for her, love her, because he tells her no. He tells her that she's got to recover before they have sex or she'll always regret it.
Kristina's relationships are all but nonexistent and her mother and stepfather are at a loss. I like seeing her relationship with them because they really don't know what to do. They know she's on something but their solution is punishment, which clearly isn't helping. I like seeing the adults at a loss, as confused as the child their raising because most times, that's how it ends up. They don't know how to handle their child's drug addiction anymore than the teen does. Parents aren't omnipotent beings who can fix all. They're human and, in situations like this, just as confused as their kids. That doesn't always come across in problem novels.
Kristina ends up in jail one night (right after her 17th birthday where she was high on ecstasy, meth, booze and weed) and meets a girl who connects her straight to the source. Kristina doesn't have to search for a dealer any longer; she becomes one, selling to her friends.
The only problem that arose for me is that Kristina ends up pregnant as a result of her rape. We find out that it's not Chase's kid (like we originally thought) but Brendan's. He's also the one who gives her the money to get an abortion. But Kristina, right before she goes through with it, thinks that she feels her baby move (which she is later told is impossible at eight weeks) and decides against it. It's her baby that makes her admit her pregnancy to her parents and decide to come clean. It was the only thing that bothered me, as if a baby could magically make everything better.
However, not everything did get better. We're never really told whether she tells her parents about her Meth addiction. In fact, from the way that it's told, it doesn't sound like she does. It sounds like she deals with her addiction herself. And it wasn't an easy habit to give up. In her narration, Kristina admits to her readers that she slipped a few times. Even when the book ends, it not necessarily happy. Life as a mother is hard. She loves her son but knows she's a 17 year old kid who knows nothing about raising a baby and gets annoyed by his crying. And we don't know that she's given up the Meth 100%. We know she's trying, that she wants to be better for her kid, but the last line says, "The monster will forever speak. And today, it's calling me out the door." We are given the indication that she still struggles with her addiction, which I liked. Addiction, especially addictions to drugs like Meth, don't go away. You aren't magically cured. They're addictions that you fight the rest of your life.
The other thing I liked about this book was the style. Usually, I hate reading things not in prose. They come off to me as abrupt sentences and hard to read. However, Hopkins had a PURPOSE to her formatting. A lot of times, she would put words out to the side and if you read just those words they gave a different message than what you were reading, like all along Kristina was crying out for someone to help her. There was one that she had done ecstasy and the writing was in the shape of an "E." For some reason, the formatting didn't bother me like it usually does when prose is written in poetry format. This time, I think it enhanced the story. It really put you into the mindset of Kristina and everything that she was going through.
I recommend this book to anyone who likes books that deal with heavy issues. This one certainly does and it handles it well an appropriately. Hopkins manages to avoid most of the contrite endings that occur in problem novels and really address the problem maturely and respectfully.
Books so far this year: 16/75
Currently Reading: A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray & Jane Boleyn: The Story of the Infamous Lady Rochford by Julia Fox
You can read this review and all other at im_writing or my Goodreads account.