Review: Junk by Melvin Burgess

Dear Blog,

note: this is published as Smack in the US. 

Summary (from Goodreads): Like so many teenagers, Tar and Gemma are fed up with their parents. Tar's family is alcoholic and abusive, and Gemma feels her home life is cramped by too many restrictions. The young British couple runs away to Bristol in search of freedom, and finds it in the form of a "squat." This vacant building is also occupied by two slightly older teens who share everything with Tar and Gemma (including their heroin habits). For a while, everything is parties and adventures, but slowly Tar and Gemma find themselves growing more and more dependent on the drug--whose strict mandates are even less forgiving than those of the parents they fled. As Gemma says, "You take more and more, and more often. Then you get sick of it and give up for a few days. And that's the really nasty thing because then, when you're clean, that's when it works so well."

Review:  You know when you read those books that are set at another point in time, or in another country, but still feel like they could totally happen to you, right here and right now?  Yeah, Junk is one of those books.   Even though it was published in 1996 (?) and is apparently set in the early to mid 1980s , it feels like that it's still set in the present day.  It's so contemporary, and so much of it entirely universal.  The desire to get away from your parents and stand on your own two feet, and  the urge to have a good time.  Alas, though, you know that it's inevitable that Gemma and Tar aren't going to go about it the right way. You have to watch on as gradually things go from bad to worse and worse than that.

For much of the first part of the book, I didn't really like Gemma.    I mean, I pitied her, and I wanted her to emerge from her nightmarish experiences alive, but that doesn't necessarily mean that I liked her.   Especially at the beginning of the book, I often wanted to slap her.   She was so frivolous and shallow, and so careless and thoughtless for others, it was entirely frustrating.
About two-thirds of the way into the book, though that seemed to change, and by the end of the book she seemed to be the stronger character; determined to get clean of her heroin addiction.  The book is set over the course of about five years, so you could certainly see how she had matured from a bratty child to a woman.

Tar's character seemed to be the reverse.  At the beginning I thought he was the stronger of the two, more rational and thoughtful.  Plus I pitied him for the tough time he'd had at home;  he had reasons for running away from his family, and Gemma was just along for the ride. But in the latter part of the novel he seemed less likeable and weaker.  One thing stayed the same; I still felt sorry for him, but in a different sort of way, and I still wanted him to try and turn his life around.

If you've put up with my rambling for a while you'll know I am quite the fan of multiple-narrative novels.  Done well, they work fantastically.  Forbidden, Finding Cassie Crazy, Monsters of Men and so on are amongst my favourite books, and I probably wouldn't have liked them as half as much as if there had only been one of the principal characters telling the story.  Also, it particularly pleased me that some of the secondary characters like Vonny, Richard.  The look into Lily's mind was particularly creepy  insightful. 

The plot was pretty nightmarish. It's one of those books that you want to just keep reading into the small hours of the morning, and put it down and run as far away from it as possible.  It's dark stuff. Heroin, prostitution, homelessness, abuse, heroin, alcoholism, teenage pregnancy, drunken all-night parties, and did I mention heroin?  In some respects you could think of it as overkill, like an overload of issues, but you can see how one leads to another.  It's pretty claustrophobic in parts, like you're in a dark tunnel, and you want to run to the end and get out into the daylight as fast as you can.  The ending to the book isn't entirely without hope, though, so you're left wondering how and if Gemma and Tar turned their lives around.
It's certainly not a book that I'll forget easily.

In three words: dark, hard-hitting, nightmarish.
Recommended for: older teenagers.
Rating: 4.5

Review: Burned by Ellen Hopkins

Dear blog,

Summary (from Goodreads): Raised in a religious -- yet abusive -- family, Pattyn Von Stratten starts asking questions -- about God, a woman's role, sex, love. She experiences the first stirrings of passion, but when her father catches her in a compromising position, events spiral out of control. Pattyn is sent to live with an aunt in the wilds of Nevada to find salvation and redemption. What she finds instead is love and acceptance -- until she realizes that her old demons will not let her go.

Review: You may or may not know that I'm a massive fan of Ellen Hopkins, after reading her novels Crank and Glass (strangely, I never actually reviewed them, though I mention my fandom a lot). Anyway, my expectations for Burned were very high.
It was no disappointment.

Burned wasn't quite as...dark, I suppose, as the disturbed-and-disturbing Glass. That doesn't mean that Ellen Hopkins doesn't pack a punch in this one. She does. Though it's probably the one of her books that deals with the least- or at least *lighter* issues, dark things abound, sometimes until you feel almost claustrophobic, especially towards the end of the book, when it seems like there's really no way out for Pattyn in the midst of her misfortune. And, well, there isn't, really. Compelling as it is, Burned isn't the sort of book that the reader really enjoys (Forbidden by Tabitha Suzuma springs to mind).

The way that Ellen Hopkins writes intrigues me.  She dares to do interesting, exciting things with her poetry; shape poems, double meanings, and in some cases poems within poems. It's pretty inspiring (at least to me, struggling to finish a couple of verse novels), and not once does it sound awkward or interrupted.  The whole thing flows continuously, kind of like listening to one long song in a way. 
I've read a fair few reviews from readers who've despised this book because they think it doesn't portray contemporary Mormon life in an accurate sort of way. I couldn't say whether they're right or not because I'm not LDS myself.  So I'll just kind of skirt round that and leave you to make your own conclusion on the matter.  So moving swiftly onwards and upwards. 

The heroine of the story is Pattyn, who is like her six sisters named after a military general from one point or another in American history.  She is- was- depends how you look at it- a nice character, though I found it quite hard to relate to her- which could just be because our circumstances are so different.  Still, she was one of those characters who changed, one of those characters who by the end of the book was completely different from the girl she had been at the start, and for that I liked her.  She had an interesting voice, or narration you could say; she seemed quite matter-of-fact, and never seemed very self-pitying yet didn't really possess a stiff upper lip.  Maybe it was her upbringing- for all her unruly actions, especially in the first part of the book, she almost seemed almost calm in the way she told her story. 

Burned is, among other things, a love story.  And the object of Pattyn's desire is Ethan.  He was nice enough, I suppose, but not one of those crushworthy fictional boys that I come across now and again *cough*YukiSohma*cough*Nate*spluttercough*.
Anyway.  I liked him, but that was probably only because I wanted so much for Pattyn to be happy and if he made her happy then I was happy.  Kind of.  Apart from the fact that he kills mountain lions- which is in fact pretty awesome-  he himself didn't seem to have any other vaguely remarkable characteristics.  

The ending is the thing that causes so many of the one and two-star reviews on Amazon, at least it seems so.  It's very vague, very uncertain and very agonising in the way that it finishes. Still, I think it was quite a fitting end.  The thing that leads up to the end (I won't say what it is) I definitely saw coming, but then I didn't see the ultimate conclusion- that is, the cliffhanger.   If you don't like the way it finishes, then go and watch an old My Little Pony video.  Alternatively you could do this after you've finished Burned, to cheer you up and give you some more hope for humanity. 

In three words: devastating, compelling, incredible.
Recommended for: everybody who hasn't read an Ellen Hopkins book yet; I think this is a good  introduction.  Wait until the Crank trilogy or Tricks for the really dark stuff. 
Rating: 5.