Cranked by Ellen Hopkins
Cranked is a 2009 Illinois Abraham Lincoln Award nominee (award goes to a premiere adolescent novel of the last five years—like 8th-12th grades sort of,
Twilight won last year). Being that I think I want to start focusing on YA lit, I figured I better get cracking on reading some of the 20 nominees (this is my third completed).
As for the book, wow, it’s pretty amazing. I have nothing but respect for books of this structure. I’m told that it’s similar to
Go Ask Alice and I can equate it with the recent Sonya Sones’ novels. The style is this poetic journal where our hero (in this case a meth addicted teenager) unfolds their life to the reader in a beautiful way. It’s a 500+ page quick read, but the most fascinating aspect of it for me structurally is the duality that the pages offer. So many pages have four sentences, but they’re formatted in such a way that certain words are pulled from each sentence to create alternate meanings. I have no idea how authors accomplish this and my mind is far too linear to even try to recreate one page of this, let alone the fifty or so on which they manage to do it.
Beyond the amazingly beautiful structure, Cranked has a pretty fascinating, if not formulaic, story in its own right. Kristina is a 16 year old who goes to visit her loser father who she hasn’t seen since she was a child. While there, she is exposed to some less than lovely experiences including her first experience with Crank, which is meth, for anyone as ignorant to drugs as myself.
The story follows her experiences there and when she arrives back to her “normal” family of mother, stepfather, lesbian sister, and younger brother. Somehow, Hopkins manages to create a relatively engrossing world that falls in on Kristina (considering it’s a YA novel). I suppose this shouldn’t be terribly shocking since the book is reportedly pretty autobiographical with her daughter as the unfortunate narrator.
This is a somewhat lengthy review for a YA novel, but I think it warrants it. The story really had me fascinating and wanting to read the next page and the next scene. The structure, as I said, is insanely brilliant creatively, for someone like me who has trouble thinking in anything but a linear logical fashion.
Obligatory Bad Line: I cranked it out in under two hours.
4*/5
Excerpt image. This isn't the best example of some of the 'dual meaning' that these pages can offer, but it showcases the structure.
Last edited by SoloAJ; 11-06-2008 at 11:46 PM.