Glass by Ellen Hopkins
Glass
Crank
Young Adult
681
This review is a little late. Sorry about that. It has been a busy week and on top of that I have a horrible head cold. I am powering through. Mostly. So on to my review…
Glass by Ellen Hopkins is the second in the Crank series. If you haven’t read Crank and want to avoid spoilers, don’t read this review. Although I will tell you to read it because I find the subject important and the she writes the best novels in poem form. If you have read it or don’t mind spoilers (I love spoilers, personally), read on.
In this book we find Kristina, the main character, as a single mom to Hunter (a result of rape) and living with her mom and step dad. She is clean. No meth, no cigarettes. However, we see addiction rear it’s ugly head and off we go.
Glass, like Crank, is heartbreakingly real. It tears you up to read. Kristina has fallen back into the cycle of her meth addiction and we see it go further than it did in the first book. You really see her lose complete control. She doesn’t want to be an addict, but can’t seem to stop. Bad decisions are made. Horrifying things happen. Through it all you have Kristina wanting to be with her son, knowing she should be a good mom and not do drugs, but then you get her alter ego, Bree, egging on her addiction. I don’t want to tell you the details of where we leave Kristina at the end of this book, but I will say it is not a happy ending. It’s an ending. A very realistic one. One people around our country are living right now, right this minute.
Some side notes on this series. It is based on the life of Ellen Hopkins’ real life daughter who has struggled with a meth addiction. Also, there are three books in the series. Fallout is the final book and looks at the lives of Kristina’s children. I would like to not that Ellen Hopkins writes very realistic fiction. It is so real that the books are often times banned. Realistic fiction makes people uncomfortable. It makes people see what they would rather choose to ignore in the real world. That being said, I believe these books are a must read. I would recommend them to teenagers everywhere. (Can you tell I am very much against the banning of books. A topic for another day.)
Read it. Love it. Hate it. It’s definitely one of those books that toes the line. You don’t want to say you loved it because of the subject matter, but you don’t want to say you hated it. It’s real. What more could you ask for?
Don’t let the page count shock you! It’s written in poetry and goes fast!