Crank by Ellen Hopkins
pages: 537
released: October 2004
publisher: Simon Pulse
cover love: ♥
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. (from Goodreads)
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON 6/13/2011 ON BOOKSLIKESTARS.NET
Review:
“It’s crank. Meth. The Monster.
It’s a bitch on the body, but damn do you fly.”
This book took my breath away. I loved it, yet terrified of it all at the same time. Kristina is the pretty caged bird with the entity of a fierce hawk living deep within her. When she flies from her perfect Nevada life to the seamy lows of New Mexico to visit her absentee father, trying to establish a relationship between them. Little did she know she would be left to fill her days with her own devices. In a new place, where nobody knows her, where she doesn’t have to be perfect Kristina. She can be whomever she wants. She can have a demon. And Bree, her alter-ego is that demon, trapped in a box. And meth was the key to unleashing her. She’s the gremlin that got fed after midnight. And she helps “the monster” wreck havoc on Kristina’s life, faltering every decision she makes. In those few months in which the story takes place, the person she was would be swept away on gritty yellow lines, until even her own family couldn’t recognize her anymore.
There are many YA novels that touch on the same topics of teens mixing with drugs and sex but Hopkins’s phenomenal writing and word play, makes Crank stand out from the rest. This being my first encounter with fiction written in verse, I must say, it made it extremely hard for me not to bond with Kristina and her struggle with addiction. Line after line stayed with me long after I closed the book, circling around inside my head like dark blistering paper planes. The emotion shown through Kristina’s eyes is so real, so honest, that it burns right through the skin until you’re at the last page and all you are is a skeleton. No longer shadowed by the protection of living flesh and ignorance. What made me connect with the Kristina so much more is knowing that she’s a real life person (Hopkins wrote this based very loosely on her daughter). I know this was a hard story to tell and for a mother to tell it about her own child makes it damn near impossible. Ellen Hopkins shows an incredible strength and I applaud her for sharing with us her most intimate nightmare about how “the monster” transformed her family. How she took all that pain, grated it against sharp-edged words and scattered the shavings across paper to make Crank. I know she has touched many young reader’s lives with this novel and the ones that followed it.
In short, Crank is exceptional. Not many books have touched my heart the way this one did. Glass and Fallout are continuations of Kristina’s battle with drugs and I can’t wait to read both.
5
