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Vault Review: Crank by Ellen Hopkins (#1 Crank, #2 Glass, #3 Fallout)

Boxed set of the Crank Trilogy by Ellen Hopkins  The Crank Trilogy by Ellen Hopkins (  Bookshop.org | Amazon.com )

 

We are revisiting our reviews of the Crank trilogy today, due to a recent challenge to Crank in my own school district (you never REALLY think it will happen in your area until it does).  Yesterday we published an interview of Ellen Hopkins from our vault, which I hope you’ll read. Today, we present our reviews of The Crank Trilogy, consisting of Crank, Glass, and Fallout. 

 

Crank by Ellen Hopkins

Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2010 (Reprint edition)

ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1416995135

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition, audiobook. ( Bookshop.org | Amazon.com )

 

Crank is Ellen Hopkins’ controversial, and sorely needed, verse novel. Kristina Snow’s life changes forever when her father and the boy she’s crushing introduce her to meth. Unlike Impulse, which is raw and shredding in its emotion, Crank is almost cold at times, brutally showing a girl on the edge of being a woman, who should have the kind of life that discourages drug use, choosing to ride with the monster time after time. Likewise, the people in her life who should be able to step in, fail, leaving Kristina alone to fight a beast that defeats most adults.

 

Crank is a difficult book to handle, but it’s far closer to reality than any drug awareness program I went through in school. Hopkins’ books are strongly positioned to be of great value as fiction, as poetry, and for their educational value, as they boldly strip away pretenses and sensitivities to show addiction as the cruel master it is. Highly recommended for public collections as well as recommended reading material for those whose lives have been scarred by the real life monsters on our streets.

Contains: sex, language, drug use, rape

 

Glass by Ellen Hopkins

Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2009 (Reprint edition)

ISBN-13: 978-1416940913

Available: New and Used  ( Bookshop.org | Amazon.com )

 

Glass is the direct follow up to Crank. Glass continues the story of Kristina Snow after she’s had her baby, and kicked meth and nicotine, shortly before her eighteenth birthday. It follows her relapse in her struggle with the meth monster and goes farther than Crank imagined. Sharp and painful,  Glass is hard to read. For one, Kristina seems to not even care that she’s making such horrible mistakes. Almost on autopilot in her quest to fill simple needs, this reader more than once wanted to reach into the lines and try to shake some sense into her.

 

While Crank goes very far to combat drug use as an introductory tale, Glass is Anti-Drug 201, a hardcore look at more of the nasty side effects of addiction, as good as an uncut marathon of Intervention with viewers thrust, uncomfortably, inside Kristina’s head. There’s no doubt it will be too much for many readers, either too brutal, or too close to home. Hopkins savagely slices through any illusions of “normal life” with beautiful poems and style that makes the story she’s telling all the more horrific. Highly recommended.

Contains: sex, drug use, language, domestic violence

 

Reviewed by Michele Lee

 

Fallout by Ellen Hopkins

Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2010

ISBN-13: 978-1416950097

Available: New and Used  (  Bookshop.org | Amazon.com )

 

In Fallout, the third book in the series that started with Crank, centered on meth addict Kristina Snow, Hopkins moves on to show the effect Kristina’s selfish ways still have on her children, and covers a wide spectrum of emotional and psychological problems. Fallout is told through three narrators: Hunter, Kristina’s first child, born of rape and trying to deal with rage; Autumn, who struggles with OCD and turns to alcohol to get her through a major life change; and Summer, who is unaware that she has siblings, and has been raised by a series of abusive foster homes and her own addict father.

 

Fallout is raw, as can be expected from Hopkins, sharp and yet beautiful as well. Hopkins manages to bring new sympathy to the subject, even to characters readers are already familiar with and have started to hate. While the full scope of the story would be missed if readers started the series here, this is the book that will most call to the loved one or friend struggling to support (or justify not supporting) an addict. Highly recommended.

Contains: drug use, sex, language

 

Reviewed by Michele Lee

Posted on August 9, 2021 by , Reply

Book Review: In The Woods by Tana French

cover art for In The Woods by Tana French

In The Woods(Dublin Murder Squad #1) by Tana French

Viking, 2007

ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0670038602

Available: Used hardcover, Kindle edition, paperback, mass market paperback, audiobook.

( Bookshop.org | Amazon.com )

 

 

In one of the sessions at StokerCon this year panelists brought up the Suburban Gothic. Does it exist? The suburbs probably don’t seem like a source of dark family secrets and horrific events to you,  but I live in the suburbs, and there’s a lot more hidden beneath the surface than most people might expect.

 

What better place to start exploring Suburban Gothic than with In the Woods (Dublin Murder Squad #1) by Tana French? Taking place in 2004 Ireland, this is a messed up story from the beginning. Twenty years ago, three twelve-year-old kids disappeared into the wooded area behind their subdivision, and only one of them was found, with his clothes covered in blood, unable to remember anything. The survivor, Adam Ryan, moved across the country, started going by another name, and eventually worked his way up though police bureaucracy to the elite Dublin Murder Squad. Now a new murder has been committed in the same place… is it possible it is the same person responsible for his friends’ disappearance? Rob’s partner Cassie is doubtful that he can be objective, but she keeps his secret as the two of them investigate the murder of a twelve-year-old girl found on a sacrificial altar at an archaeological site near the woods.

 

Rob, the narrator, is an unreliable narrator who disintegrates in front of the reader’s eyes as his memories start to unravel and the personality he’s constructed for himself since his friends’ disappearance begins to peel away. It’s unclear even how much of what he’s telling us is actually happening and how much his mind is playing tricks on him as he and Cassie track down leads on their current case, thinking that perhaps it will also lead to the solution of Rob’s friends’ disappearance. In the midst of it all the workers at the dig are up against a deadline as developers plan to dig up the site to start construction on a motorway, and (speaking from experience here) there’s nothing like corrupt developers with money on the line and government officials in their pocket to liven up surburbanites against new construction.

 

French does a great job with build ups, but I felt her follow through on plot points and building relationships was sometimes a let down, or confusing. Character development is confusing, possibly because we are seeing everything through Rob’s eyes and his perceptions are unreliable. Rob himself is not an especially likable character–and from the beginning pages we know he can’t be trusted– but I loved the friendship between Rob and Cassie and was not happy with how French handled it at the end. French’s language can be evocative and lyrical: the woods of the title appear a magical, haunted place, even as close to the rather prosaic subdivision Rob, and the victim he is investigating, grew up in.

 

Compelling and disturbing until the last few pages (there is one major, essential piece of the story that is never explained, leaving it with a bothersome hole at the endcover art for In The Woods by Tana French) Tana French has successfully evoked Suburban Gothic, the darkness that lies under the pleasant-looking surface of suburbia.

Posted on June 11, 2021 by , Reply

Book Review: Tome by Ross Jeffrey

cover art for Tome by Ross Jeffrey

Tome by Ross Jeffrey

Independently published, 2020

ISBN-13 : 979-8647504074

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition ( Amazon.com )

 

Ross Jeffrey has penned a thrilling, brutal Stoker finalist that pulls zero punches yet has the class of a Ketchum story.  Juniper Correctional facility, a blight on human’s blistered history, has long housed the worst of the worst, the people who operate below the level of human beings.

The story belongs to pair of characters who are both steered by Juniper, the machine that churns and spits out souls: Warden Fleming sits on one end of the spectrum, hoarding secrets that boil beneath the prison surface, and Frank Whitten, a guard who refuses to give up the last strand of light within him.

The story spirals inward up on itself, devouring everything in its path. Juniper is pure hell incarnate, infesting its inmates, guards, and others with a darkness that is more pitch than anything supernatural. It’s not for the squeamish: Jeffrey aims for the jugular, without much subtlety, yet somehow, still manages to build an effective, claustrophobic atmosphere to constrict our deepest insecurities. Juniper as a setting becomes the main character between the pages, an effective and frightening tool that likely scored this nomination.

For fans of brutal, effective horror, with echoes of Edward Lee, Richard Laymon, and Jack Ketchum, Tome will not disappoint. Recommended.

 

Contains: Extreme gore and violence, body horror, racism

 

Reviewed by David Simms

Editor’s note: Tome is a nominee on the final ballot of this year’s Bram Stoker Award in the category of Superior Achievement in a First Novel. 

Posted on May 16, 2021 by , Reply
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