Courage, my friend

Review of ‘Crank’ by Ellen Hopkins

Posted on 22 July 2007

Title:	Crank
Author:	Ellen Hopkins
Rating:	5/5
Link:	Amazon
Summary:	A brilliantly-written visceral, heady, aching descent into drug addiction.

It has been a strange day for me, today.  The final tome of Harry Potter arrived.  And I bought and read a different book instead.

My reading has always been sporatic.  I tend to have so many projects on the go, I just don’t have a lot of time to read.  And, lately (ie. the last year or two), I’ve actually taken to starting books and not finishing them.  And it has nothing to do with the quality of the writing.

Anyway, today I picked up Crank, by Ellen Hopkins, on a whim.  I was in Indigo with a friend and saw it on the shelf.  I had recently seen the dismal Jason Statham movie of the same name, and I picked up the book primarily because I couldn’t believe the movie could be based on a book.  A glance at the back cover made it obvious the book and the movie were unrelated:

Crank is a novel told in poems.  Chapters are a page or two long, a few dozen words each, often written both across and down the page, in shapes that give weight to phrases, feelings, and settings.  As often as not, it pays to read down the page first, and across second.  Every page is a study in controlled, careful writing, where single words often hold more meaning and feeling than entire books by lesser authors.

The story is written from the perspective of Kristina, a 16 year old, self-concious “good” girl, who finds a much more liberated persona — Bree — in a hit of crystal meth, a one-time thing that quickly becomes something much more.

Kristina is prone to infatuations with cute boys, and Bree sees to it that they take an interest in return.  She has three boyfriends during the course of a year, two of them who she loves, and one who loves her back.  The writing captures her hormone-induced longing, and the heady confusion of adolescent love, all complicated by a growing drug habit.

Meanwhile, Kristina’s relationship with her family — which, to everyone’s ignorance, was on shaky ground to begin with — begins to collapse, as it becomes increasingly difficult to hide her changing attitude and the physical damage her drug habit is causing her.

The Author’s Note explains “While this work is fiction, it is loosely based on a very true story — my daughter’s.”  Let me tell you, if even a tenth of the backstory is true, Ellen Hopkins is one brave writer.  Writing from her daughter’s perspective, she never flinches for even a second from the — at times — scathing view Kristina has of her.

Crank is one of the best books I’ve ever read.  In the course of the five hours it took me to read it, it made me love both Kristina/Bree and several other characters.  For the first two thirds of the book, it made me curious to try meth for myself, and in the last third, it made me regret ever considering it.  It never once preached.  It never once moralized.  It unflinchingly told truth through fiction, without judgement, without an agenda.  In turns, it made me laugh, made me love, made me horny, made me care, made me cry.

Run — don’t walk — and get yourself a copy of this book.  You won’t regret it.