Book Review - Crank Trilogy

Crank
Glass
Fallout
By Ellen Hopkins

Drama/ Teen/ Drugs/
537 Pages
2 and 5 Stars

To start I have only read the first novel in this trilogy, I am going to give the second book a try, assuming that it is going to be on my July TBR list.I can't remember who recommended this book to me unfortunately, because this is a great conversation novel.

I am kind of stumped and conflicted with how to review this book...  Like a book surrounding the topic of terminal illness or mental illness, I don't want to give it a bad review because of the topic but as a book it really wasn't great.

 I really find the topic of drugs and addiction interesting so from that perspective its a good book, the drug culture and experienced expressed seems very well written. But on the writing style and some of the characters it was such a disappointment. I have heard wonderful things about Ellen Hopkins writing and I certainly hope this was not the book people had in mind when they said those things.

This book is written in prose, I think it's supposed to mimic Bree's/Kristina's  thoughts, but there are often multiple meanings and voices condensed onto one page (read from left to write and then read again separately up and down by column), and it just took away from the rest of the story. I found it to be cluttered, instead of adding to the effect of the novel, it made the book irritating and hard to follow. Because of this in the case of the writing style I gave this book a 3.

For the story I gave this book a 5, it is based off of the authors daughter, who had some degree of addition to crank aka crystal meth. I am assuming that everything in this novel other than the addiction is all fictional. I found quite a few of these characters really irritating, Kristin being the most annoying in her naivety, stupidity, and childishness. She however felt like a very relatable character none the less. While Kristina's father seemed real enough her step father,mother and teachers fell flat on that frontier. The adults in her life in Reno didn't seem to notice anything was wrong, I believed that was OK for a short period of time, but for people who where supposed to have a history of drug use and addiction... they should have noticed something. I understand that in someways that would have interfered with the story and or maybe because the book is told from Kristina's perspective I am supposed to assume that the parents knew more than she thinks they did. Kinda the only person your fooling is yourself situation?

All in all this book was not something I would recommend to people...