Crank
14 Jul 2009 Leave a Comment
in Uncategorized Tags: addiction, crank, drugs, It Doesn't Always Have to Rhyme, poetry, verse
Crank by Ellen Hopkins
Published by Simon Pulse, New York: 2004
537 pgs.
Recommended reading ag: 15 and up
VOYA rating: 5p, 4Q, JS
I picked this book up for a challenge. I enjoy poetry and I love lyrical writing but an entire long, epic story told completely in verse? I didn’t think that this long novel would do it for me so with trepidation I decided to give this 537 page book a try and I loved it.
This story tells the tale of Kristina, a 16 year old teen struggling with identity at home with her mom, step-father and two siblings. Her sister has recently announced she is gay and Kristina doesn’t feel incredibly close to her younger brother anymore. She remembers happy times at her mom’s house. She knows they were all happy at one time but somewhere along the line for some reason, Kristina started feeling like she didn’t belong. She started to feel there was something missing in her life. These issues of identity and lack of belonging are feelings that many teens deal with but don’t understand. Even teens who come from warm and loving homes deal with identity issues. It something that sometimes just happens during the teen years. Kristina is just going through a questioning phase and starting to feel like an outsider in her own family so she decides it is time to track down her absentee father to find that missing side to her history. Reluctantly Kristina gets her mother to agree to a summer vacation trip to visit her father.
Kristina learns very quickly that the old memories of her father are not accurate and the stories her mother has warned her about are true. Still, Kristina quickly learns to accept her father for who is: An easy-going partier who is not committed to anything and works in a bowling alley. He is also a substance abuse addict who lives in a community where drug use it rampant. Her bubble of her father has been broken but at the same time Kristina feels like he opens up a new person inside of her as Kristina starts to experiment with her identity. She takes on the persona of Bre and mentions several times that Bre had always been this other half to her, living dormant inside that now has surfaced.
Kristina meets a boy named Adam and quickly falls in love/lust with him in a very obsessive manner and he turns her on to crank. From the turning point of her starting to experiment with Adam with drugs (and other physical experimentations) Kristina’s/Bre’s life takes a dark and dangerous turn for the worst. Although they obsessively swear love to one another, Adam is already in a relationship and when his other girlfriend finds out about Bre she has an accident that leaves her in a coma near death. Adam is so grief stricken and guilty but still wants and needs to be with Bre. Their short-lived torrid affair is cut short when she has to return home to her mother. She foolishly dreams that her and Adam will somehow stay together and visit one another but she quickly learns otherwise.
Back home now, Kristina manages to skate under her mother’s radar for awhile and she starts to flirt and play the same games with other boys her age that Adam had played on her. She catches the eye of pretty-boy lifeguard Brendon and notorious bad-boy Chase. She leads them boy on, enjoying the thrill of the game but also hoping to find ways to score some crank. She even tries to use Brendon to score some crank but when she refuses to have sex with him he calls her a tease and rapes her. One thing leads to another and before you know it she has found more and more people to help her score and to experiment different drugs with. Her grades start slipping and she starts getting grounded. Her mother and stepfather both can tell something is up but either are in denial or just not entirely sure to the extent of how fall she has fallen.
By the close of the novel Bre is pregnant from being raped by Brendon and in a relationship with Chase who actually turns out to be a good guy. Chase cares about Bre, but is unfortunately a user too. He even offers to marry her even though the baby is not his. She gives birth and tries to be a good mother but you can tell that her addition is mentally still in her brain. There is a sequel to her story called “Glass” which picks up where “Crank” leaves off.
As I mentioned I was concerned about such a long book that was all verse. I really got into it. I read this all in a matter of a few hours. I enjoyed her writing and descriptions. There was still dialog and plot with plenty of characters but it was also still lyrical. It was plenty straight forward enough to understand the full and epic story of Katrina’s journey through addiction. I loved the shapes and white space that Ellen Hopkins uses in telling the story. She keeps the storytelling fresh without getting boring. I think teens would eat this up especially because it is so different and unique. She is so great at painting a vivid picture with her few short words in each piece. She makes some meaningful shapes with the words that follow the feeling of the poem. In one poem where she talks about salvation, she uses the words on the page to form a cross. In one she forms the picture of a house while talking about being home. It touches on lots of issues that many teens deal with including that of isolation and broken homes and the loss of oneself. It shows teens how terrible her life ended up when she made bad choices and tried to use drugs to fill her depression and void. The consequences she suffers as a direct result of her actions make this a very worthwhile book for teens I think.
I loved the cover with the lines of crank forming the title against a black cover. The author’s other books all have similarly styled covers, all with one word and a solid black background that teens will find recognizable. Also, although this is a work of fictional prose, the author states that it is loosely based on her daughters true life experience with crank, whom she refers to as “the monster” and what id did to the family. This ads another unique element to the story because many of these events actually happened to the author’s daughter. It makes it hit all that more closely to home for the reader.
