Summary

Ólive
It saddens me that Ellen Hopkins is said to be the bestselling living "poet" in America, considering that her writing is poetry only in the sense that the formatting looks like a poem, with short fragmentary lines, and ever-so-clever offset summaries (ahem). It isn't especially poetic. That's not to say all her books are bad, just that she's chosen her trademark formula and is sticking to it, and it's a little tired at this point. That said, standard prose would make her brand of after-school-special melodrama impossible to wade through. By tightening up the language, she avoids writing total dreck. I thought this was her worst work though, because it was strained and because she threw in a couple of rapes for extra drama but didn't write anything substantial about them, giving the impression that the victims weren't particularly affected by their experiences. We need another contrived plot device here: "Oh, that was certainly unpleasant. But we need to advance what passes for a plot, so moving on." Oh well, rape could be fodder for the next book she spews out, right?