A review by lookingforamandaa
Triangles by Ellen Hopkins

4.0

Have you ever read anything written by Ellen Hopkins? No? Then don’t bother finishing this review. Stop what you’re doing and go get one of her books right now and read it. Everything written by this author is absolutely incredible. She’s for sure one of my favorite authors out there. The way she writes is just mind-blowing.
Triangles is the first of her adult novels that I have read and I didn’t realize that it was going to be written the same way her young adult novels are. Hopkins writes her stories in poetic verse. She’s telling us the story that we’re reading, but within that story, there are poems that reflect what’s going on within the story or tells of things to come. If you haven’t read one of her books you don’t know what I mean, so go read one of her books and then come back and read this review. After I finished this book all I could think was how difficult it must be to come up with stories like these and then write them in the form that she does. To find the right words to reflect what the story is telling. It’s honestly so amazing and I’m in awe of her talent and creativity.
As for the story, it was interesting as her stories always are. Also, as usual, this book was about many different hard topics. Hopkins isn’t one to shy away from those controversial or difficult subjects. She’s honest and powerful and real about things that need to be said. Things like cheating on your spouse, from random hookups to actual affairs, teenage pregnancy from the parents perspective, having a child who comes out to you as gay and seeing the two different sides of accepting parent and the disdainful parent, parents that have disabled or ill children. This story was honestly hard for me to read because I’m eight months pregnant and thinking about my child dealing with heartbreak or illness or the struggles within these pages had me tearing up quite a bit. This is a book that will no doubt make you feel all the emotions and think about these hard topics that you may not have thought about before.
I’m not going to go into detail about any of the characters specifically because I don’t think I can do it without spoiling because of some of my thoughts about certain characters. So instead I will talk about the overall of the book. I think it was so fascinating to see these three women have their lives connect and slowly intertwine between their choices and their children and such. Three women, so very different from one another, going through their own struggles and dealing with said struggles in their own way, it was so interesting to see the three hugely different personalities dealing with their life issues in their own ways (even if I didn’t agree with some of those ways, it was still a little fun to watch them crash and burn). Three women who, from an outside perspective, have the world and still aren’t happy with it.
Overall this story was emotional and powerful, sexy and exciting, dramatic and entertaining. It had characters you can love and characters you can love to hate. I’m not surprised in the least that I loved this story. I think Ellen Hopkins did an excellent job with this adult novel, just like she always does with her young adult ones.