Crank by Ellen H.

In Crank by Ellen Hopkins, Bree/Kristina doesn’t understand what she has done wrong. Besides smoking crank, getting hooked up to it, and sleeping with someone else’s boyfriend. Bree/Kristina has a complicated emotion. She feels she is ready to have her father back into her life. He wasn't there when she was young, but she knows her Father doesn’t deserve to see her, but she knows for a fact that there could be a change. No matter what he did or what he has become she still has hope that, maybe there could be something that could bond them together. Kristina found it; it was crank that brought her father and her together.

When she began to change into Bree, she had never noticed anything different. She was still Kristina. After a while did she realized she had begun to socializing with different people, lying more, and got punished more and more often. She is not sure whether to lock up Kristina or let Bree be an essence of her.

There were a significant number of poetic structures that stood out. Some structures having to do with her reality, others with her mind and thoughts. The techniques that were used a lot were changing the placement of words or changing the margins. Changing the way things start can add a different level of understanding to the text. In one chapter, the title began descending into a train of thought. There were words set to the right of the page; if the poem was to be read from top to bottom a shorter poem could be created.

A poem inside another poem; the emotions and switching back between Bree’s thoughts and Kristina’s innocence also add another emotion to the story. Reading the real family’s experience and the “cover-up” story (Crank) there is not much of a difference. Someone actually went through what Bree/Kristina went through which is why the poetic structure adds emphasis to the story.

This book is very appropriate for middle school students because it gives than an insight to the real world. Not everything is what they want it to be. There is a coming of age moment that they have to go through for it to shape their personalities and life styles; reality is that sometimes things are tough. Elle’s point in writing this story was to teach people the difficulties and struggles people have to witness. If parents want to keep their children blinded from reality, how will the children mature? If they think everything is perfect and happy, then they have yet to learn not everything is flowers and roses, but not everything is dangerous either. It should be allowed in middle schools, to open up the minds of those who have yet to learn.