Glass

Glass by Ellen Hopkins

This is a 680 page book that I read in 2 days.

If it were written in prose rather than free verse, it might be more realistically a 340 page book.

Still, when the Caudill Nominees are out and I am reading fanatically to get them back on the shelf, I read about 100 pages a day on a fruitful day.

So whether or not this is good literature, I obviously couldn’t put it down

Glass is the second in a trilogy that began with Crank. I read Crank because it won the Abraham Lincoln Readers’ Choice Award that is geared toward High School kids.

I think we’ve established that I love lists and I tend to be obsessive in conquering them. I think we’ve also established that I like to complete series. I cannot leave them unfinished. I might miss something. Perhaps it is a chance for a bit of control on my part in a world where I have very little.

So I come to this review wondering how I should handle it. Did I enjoy the book? Yes. Was it frightening? Yes. Were there drugs? Of course. Sex? A lot implied, but not in graphic detail. Is this book useful? Yes. Will it be used in a useful manner? Probably not.

I imagine that a lot of kids will read it to live vicariously through the character of Kristina and her alter-ego Bree. It provides the chance to live the dangerous life of a “bad” girl without the conquences of said life. We read books to experience new adventures that maybe otherwise we could never achieve.

This is one of the reasons that I prefer Fantasy and Science Fiction. They tend to be otherworldly. I like to escape into a good book. Happy endings are optional. I dislike “contemporary realistic fiction” primarily because it is an ever possible reality.

In the last week, I watched Diane Sawyer present a news report on the growing epidemic of high school aged heroin addicts. The kids were buying Oxycontin to get high until the cost rose beyond their means. I read $80 per pill. Heroin dealers moved in and began to sell bags of heroine for $5.

I visited the ABC News website and found an article on a young mother of a four-year-old daughter, five-months pregnant and addicted to heroine. She’s fighting a seven-year addiction that began with prescription drugs.

I was never tempted. I feared the wrath of MOM. I was a good child. I was relatively dependable. Disappointments were rare. I might have pushed curfew a time or two. I might have dated the wrong boy. My world was basically safe.

I could have easily been Kristina. I was gullible and impressionable and I would have adored recognition of my existence. I was lucky that an opportunity never presented itself.

I still think that Crank is an opportunity to share a dangerous threat in a safe environment. Glass, perhaps deserves an older audience. It is not so much a continued downward spiral, as continued rock bottom.

There are reviewers who are afraid that these books glamorize meth-addiction. I think that these books are very readable and can even capture the attention of the reluctant readers who may be more in need of a safety net.