Like so many of the titles that have been challenged this year, the book is written entirely in free, often pointlessly shaped verse. The opioid crisis of the last two decades keeps proving with intensifying grimness that anyone is vulnerable: twice as many Americans died of overdoses in 2021 alone than did in 15 years of war in Vietnam.Īs Hopkins writes in Kristina’s voice toward the end, in a poem called “Crank, You See,”

It’s not as if a loving mother or straight A’s or middle class comforts are buffers to what, Hopkins seems to say, could claim you as arbitrarily as cancer, without the equivalent benefits of chemo or radiation to pull you through. For those lucky enough not to have been claimed, it’s a front seat to the abyss, with no guard rail. The book takes us through the summer when Kristina, verging on 17, discovers the drug the summer she visits her loser father in Albuquerque, and gets pregnant from a rape.Ĭrank has been among the country’s most banned titles in public schools and libraries since its publication in 2004, not because of sex–there’s not much of it, and what there is couldn’t shock a nun–but because of the visceral descriptions of addiction to what Kristina calls “the monster.”įor addicts, I imagine, the book would read like a personal memoir or the diary of a familiar journey. Crank is the first book by Ellen Hopkins, a very popular young adult novelist, and the first in an autobiographical trilogy centered on her daughter’s crystal meth addiction: crank is a street euphemism for the drug.

Ellen hopkins series