katekintailbc | Crank by Ellen Hopkins (Reply)

Crank
by Ellen Hopkins

From the back of the book: 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.

Urban dictionary defines crank as: slang for a low purity, crystallized Methamphetamine that is administered in a powder form.

And now that that's out of the way... on to what I thought about the book. I read this because it was on the list of 10 books for young adults. I was sad that this wasn't available in audio, but once I opened this VERY THICK book, I realized why. The whole book is done as a series of poems of a sort. The spacing and structure of each poem is almost as important as the words used in it. There are times when I had to read pages through once linearly and then again column by column because each column was crafted as both a readable series of sentences as well as a readable column. Insanely clever and well-written. But I must admit there were times the format seemed more like an obstacle to me. It felt like I was wading through words to get to what was happening.

But that was probably the point. It took a long time to watch Kristina (Bree) descend. In fact, she seemed to be conducting herself all right on the outside for the longest time. Sure, she had to deal with an attempted suicide and a rocky love life, but she was managing to keep up appearances as much as any moody teenager. But then there was rape and her bank account being cut off. Because it was told from Bree's POV (which was a little weird, because I kept wondering how her mother knew so much about these things), it seemed like no one really knew anything of what was going on in her life. Her parents just thought she was moody and then suddenly they cut off her access to money? And the introduction letter at the beginning of the book was beautiful and heart-felt, but it mentioned the baby from the end of the book, so the whole time I read Crank, I expected her to get pregnant (which she did, but not until near the end). So that was a little strange.

In all, it was a good read, but not at all what I was expecting because of the POV (kind of unreliable narrator-like, as well, because the person telling the story is on drugs) and format. I kept questioning things and wondering when things would really get bad. It was a strange way to present the subject and didn't work for me the way it might work for teens. I'm sure I would have been affected much more if I'd read this as a teen. And while I think this is a good book, it doesn't make me want to pick up the next one or the one after that to find out more.