Have you ever been pressured to do something you know is wrong, but think to yourself that one try will not hurt until you are addicted and cannot find a way out?

Well, that is the life that Kristina Georgia Snow has everyone follow in Glass written by Ellen Hopkins.

Glass is the continuing story of Crank. Crank is about a teenager who tries crank for the first time and falls in love with the monster. The book ends with the teen is pregnant with the baby of the man who raped her.

Glass picks up shortly after the teenager named Kristina, also known as Bree, has the baby. She is not even 18 years old yet. She names the baby Hunter. For a while she had given up on the monster, to save her life and the baby's. However a few short months later she crawls back to the monster. One way includes lying to her family.

When she goes back to the monster, she meets Trey. A roommate of a friend who would become the love of her life.

However, one day being left alone with Hunter, things take a turn for the worse. She falls asleep and Hunter rolls under a chair and gets hurt. Kristina gets kicked out of her own home, and she is not allowed to take her own child.

She goes to live with Trey's cousin Brad and his two children; Latreya and Devon. The two girls do not like the fact that Kristina lives with them, because she is not in fact their mother. Eventually their mother does come back and Kristina is forced to leave.

This time after much convincing and a loss of what to do, Kristina

and Trey get their own apartment, but are poor and the only way they can keep the place is to steal money and deal meth, to pay back their dealer so they can get more meth to sale.

Eventually they also are forced to leave their apartment where they make the choice of living in their car and eating only food like McDonald’s.

Sleeping off a monster buzz, they get pulled over by a cop for parking somewhere they are not supposed to. The cop asks to search the car, to find a lockbox full of meth. Kristina's mother also turned them in for stealing from her.

As the author states in the end of the book, Kristina and Trey will no longer share an apartment, a car, a bed, a pipe, a cigarette, a kiss, promises, dreams or vows. The only thing they will share is a baby. That is, if they get out of jail in time.

I hope you all enjoyed this book as much as I did. Ellen Hopkins is a terrific writer. Her books are so raw, so real and full of truth.

Take care all.

Hopkins' books are real and raw and Crank does not fall short of that endeavor.

Her book shows the highs and the lows of trying the drug and becoming addicted.

In the novel, it all starts when the main character, Kristina Georgia Snow is sent to her fathers house in Albuquerque, far from her home in Reno and far different than what she imagined the trip to be.

There she meets Adam, A.K.A. Buddy. It is Buddy who introduces Kristina to the monster.

Kristina called herself Bree to the new people she met. Bree was her alter-ego. Someone who was outgoing and carefree while Kristina was held back and shy.

Bree (and Kristina perhaps) fell in love with Buddy (or was it Adam?) but eventually Kristina had to go back home to Reno. They wrote letters back and forth after she returned home, but their love did not last.

At this point she was addicted to the monster and needed to get her hands on it. Anyway she could. In trying to find the monster she wound up dating two guys. Chase and Brendon.

Chase ended up leaving for college sometime after they fell in love and Brendon raped her. At the end of the book she learned that she was going to have a baby.

Guess whose it was?

I will leave that one as a surprise for those who have not read the book yet.

The ending of this book is not as tragic as the others Ellen Hopkins has written, however there is a sequel to Crank called Glass.

I think her book Crank is just amazing, and so full of truth.

What do you think?

After Pattyn gets in a fight and breaks glass, her family has had enough of her rebelling so they send her to live with her Aunt, out in the middle of nowhere, for the summer, so she can no longer get in trouble.

It turns out that she has fun on her stay with her aunt, she learns how to drive and ride a horse, and meets the love of her life. She fell in love with Ethan, the son of her aunts friend. He is not Mormon and her father would kill the both of them if they were together.

After returning home things start to go bad again. She mouths off to her father and gets beaten. She takes the rap for something her sister does, and gets beaten to save her life. She also learns that she will have Ethan’s baby.

Like all of Hopkins novels, Burned also has a tragic ending. Ethan and Pattyn get in a car wreck and she wakes up in the hospital to learn that she lost Ethan and her baby. In the end she says that God could not be love because love was a corpse, because she lost the love of her life, and the only thing remnant of him.

Her book made me feel a sense of relief, knowing that other people can go through the same ordeals that I have been through.

In her book Impulse, three strangers named Conner, Vanessa and Tony and up at Aspen springs, a mental institution, due to their suicide attempts. Vanessa was described as a beautiful young girl, but her cutting was a big part of her life. Later on in the book, she explained that her only cure was love.

Tony ended up in the institution with an attempted overdose on drugs. Tony’s character was described as having a bad childhood which led to him using pills to find peace. Conner found himself entering the doors of the institution after he tried shooting himself.

The three strangers ended up being friends and helping each other through their stay at Aspen Springs. Vanessa and Tony ended up responding well to the treatment and were on the track to getting better, however Conner found no hope, so he ended up jumping off the cliff on purpose.

All of Ellen Hopkins books are very tragic, but very inspiring. Her other books up till now are: Crank, Burned and Glass. They are all written in verse and all of the pages are set up creatively.

For anyone who wants a different type of reading experience, I suggest you pick up one of her Verse novels and give it a try. In my opinion, her books are well worth the read.