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A review by lexythebookworm_
Smoke by Ellen Hopkins
4.0
4 ⭐️
"Blamed for her abusive father's death and haunted by the loss of her boyfriend and their unborn child, Patty Von Stratten is on the run. Aboard a bus destines for California, she makes friends with Adriana, a young girl whose family helps her find work as a housekeeper for the Jorgensens, a wealthy ranch-owning family. Pattyn sets out to build a new life under a false identity, but she is overwhelmed by feelings of loss and guilt and questions her ability to build new relationships and establish a new existence. Back home, her younger sister is the sole person who knows what happened in the shed that day, but Jackie is haunted by troubles of her own. Her mother, for one, refuses to accept reality and the role Caleb played in the death of the girl's father. Smoke, the much anticipated sequel to Burned, brings closure to one girl's heart-wrenching journey."
Ellen Hopkins has a unique style that I honestly like a lot. It is not only entertaining to read because of the content but because of the presentation of it. She presents her words not only as such but also as images and has some clever twists with the page layouts and the way the content is distributed, hiding some messages by doing this or just illustrating a scene with the printed words on the page.
I really got hooked with the first book of this biology, Burned, and suffered all the way through the story with it's characters.
Same happened to me with this second part, but just a bit less I guess, because I liked the story of the first one better. I enjoyed it a lot and read it in just a few days and just a few sittings. The story has some unexpected twists that really made me tell myself "hang in there, breathe" while suffering through the events while being completely shook on the book. I liked reading the evolution of the main characters a lot, really got me into trying to put myself in their shoes and live their journeys with them.
There is a lot of physical, verbal and sexual abuse in both books, there's no argument in abuse being the main theme here. On the author's note you can read the following: "I should not have stayed as long as I did, but like many women, I thought if I only did the right things, I could fix him. It rarely works out that way." She also states how we should always speak up and get away of any abusive or toxic relationship the moment we notice it is and how we should always help someone out of it as well, without further waiting.
However, even though abuse is all over it's pages, it is not a book that brings you trauma to read. It's actually pretty light. So I would recommend it to everyone and personally argument that abuse victims could also read it with no PTSD associated with doing so. And I think this is a really nice input from the author into abuse related literature.
"Blamed for her abusive father's death and haunted by the loss of her boyfriend and their unborn child, Patty Von Stratten is on the run. Aboard a bus destines for California, she makes friends with Adriana, a young girl whose family helps her find work as a housekeeper for the Jorgensens, a wealthy ranch-owning family. Pattyn sets out to build a new life under a false identity, but she is overwhelmed by feelings of loss and guilt and questions her ability to build new relationships and establish a new existence. Back home, her younger sister is the sole person who knows what happened in the shed that day, but Jackie is haunted by troubles of her own. Her mother, for one, refuses to accept reality and the role Caleb played in the death of the girl's father. Smoke, the much anticipated sequel to Burned, brings closure to one girl's heart-wrenching journey."
Ellen Hopkins has a unique style that I honestly like a lot. It is not only entertaining to read because of the content but because of the presentation of it. She presents her words not only as such but also as images and has some clever twists with the page layouts and the way the content is distributed, hiding some messages by doing this or just illustrating a scene with the printed words on the page.
I really got hooked with the first book of this biology, Burned, and suffered all the way through the story with it's characters.
Same happened to me with this second part, but just a bit less I guess, because I liked the story of the first one better. I enjoyed it a lot and read it in just a few days and just a few sittings. The story has some unexpected twists that really made me tell myself "hang in there, breathe" while suffering through the events while being completely shook on the book. I liked reading the evolution of the main characters a lot, really got me into trying to put myself in their shoes and live their journeys with them.
There is a lot of physical, verbal and sexual abuse in both books, there's no argument in abuse being the main theme here. On the author's note you can read the following: "I should not have stayed as long as I did, but like many women, I thought if I only did the right things, I could fix him. It rarely works out that way." She also states how we should always speak up and get away of any abusive or toxic relationship the moment we notice it is and how we should always help someone out of it as well, without further waiting.
However, even though abuse is all over it's pages, it is not a book that brings you trauma to read. It's actually pretty light. So I would recommend it to everyone and personally argument that abuse victims could also read it with no PTSD associated with doing so. And I think this is a really nice input from the author into abuse related literature.