Review 473: Crank

Crank by Ellen Hopkins
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Next month (April) a new top 10 of the most banned books will be coming out. I was looking over last year’s list, nearly all are young adult titles. This one stood out for a me a little, as it said the book was in poetry form. I was curious about the format.

So, I wanted to see what this was…read a preview then decided, okay let’s read a bit more, see how this goes, then read the entire book in one day.

This is one of those cautionary tale for teens against getting into drugs, particularly meth, which also goes by many other names. The main character reflects what happened to the author’s daughter, so it is more based on fact than fiction.

The daughter, Kristina, was sent to her father’s for a summer visit of several weeks, court ordered after nearly no contact for eight years. He lives in another state, she gets on a plane alone for the visit. Her father is negligent to an extreme.

Kristina comes home with a new personality, calls herself Bree to her new friends and has new habits, such as smoking cigarettes, kissing boys, and oh yeah a monster habit for meth. It’s a downward spiral from there.

And this brief summary is exactly what happened to the author’s daughter as well.

The poetry format was unique, and occasionally got in the way of the story-telling, but for the most part it was just a unique way to tell this story. A powerful book for sure.