Book Review -- Crank by Ellen Hopkins

Hi everyone! I know it's been a really long time since either of us have posted something. Life has been pretty busy and stressful lately!

However, now that winter break is here, I've had more time to read! Yay! Over the past couple of days, I was reading a book titled Crank by Ellen Hopkins. To be quite frank, I didn't exactly find this book an enjoyable read. In fact, I particularly disliked it.

I found this book rather disappointing, and couldn't bring myself to finish it, so I will only be reviewing the first 3/4 of the book.

Here is a quick summary of the book:

This is a book about a girl who is struggling with an addiction to crank. She is attempting to feed her addiction, but she is also having to deal with the consequences of her poor choices.

For me, the characters in this book were very difficult to connect with. Specifically, the main character. To be honest, I was repulsed by her character, perhaps because of the numerous poor decisions that she made throughout the book. Nothing about her character is very likeable. She made poor choices, didn't care about herself or the people around her, was a drug addict, and wasn't trying to get herself into a better situation. To add to this, she was also letting the people around her control a large part of what she did with herself.

Although there were many things I disliked about this book, I enjoyed the way the book was written. The book was written through many free verse poems, which I found very interesting. I was amazed at how well a story could be told through a few verses. Ellen Hopkins is very good at being able to tell so much in just a few words.

It was extremely disturbing to see how a drug can completely destroy the life of a person. The main character started off as a character who seemed to have everything going for her: good grades, friends and good health. As the book progresses, we see how the main character begins to completely destroy her life because of her addiction.

Perhaps I didn't enjoy the book very much because of the topic and how it was presented rather as a good thing than a bad thing. This didn't settle very well with me. Because of how graphic the novel was, I found that it was too hard to read, and I didn't want to finish it.

Overall, I liked the style of writing, but I didn't really enjoy the story that was being told. I would give this book 2.5 stars out of 5.  Although this isn't a fantastic rating, I did like the writing style and would be willing to read some of Ellen Hopkins' work on other topics.


Thanks for stopping by!