Fallout by Ellen Hopkins

(Crank trilogy, book 3)
Hunter. Autumn. Summer.

Different homes. Different guardians. Different

Last names.

Different lives.

But there is one person who binds them together.

Kristina.

Nineteen years after Kristina Snow met the monster – crank – her children are reeling from the consequences of her decisions. Instead of one big, happy family, they are a desperate tangle of scattered lives united by anger, doubt, and fear.

A predisposition to addiction and a sense of emptiness where a mother’s love should be leads all three down the road of their mother’s notorious legacy. Sex, drugs, alcohol, abuse – there is more of Kristina in her children than they would ever like to believe. But when the thread that ties them together brings them face-to-face, they’ll discover something powerful in each other and in themselves – the trust, the hope, the courage to begin to break the cycle.  

Fallout is the bestselling author Ellen Hopkin’s riveting conclusion to her trilogy begun by Crank and Glass. It is a revelation and a testament to the harsh reality that addiction is never just one person’s problem.

WARNING: This book contains sexual situations, drug abuse, and profanity.

This last book in the Crank trilogy keeps form as it is written in verse, however it is written from the point of view of Kristina’s three children. It goes back and forth between Hunter, Autumn, and Summer as we see the effect Kristina’s meth addiction has on her children. Hunter is Kristina’s first child, and was adopted by her mother in the second book, Glass. He still lives in Reno, hasn’t met his father, and has his own set of issues. He tends to drink heavily, lash out angrily, and cheat on his serious girlfriend, Nikki. Most of Hunter’s story is him trying to do damage control to save his relationship that he has destroyed. Autumn is seventeen-years-old and lives in San Antonio with her sister. She suffers from OCD and panic attacks and frequently uses alcohol to help ease her pain. The youngest, Summer, is fifteen-years-old and has been passed around between multiple foster homes, and suffered sexual abuse. She meets Kyle, a meth user, after her father is arrested for a DUI and she is placed back in foster care. They all meet at Kristina’s mother’s house for Christmas and realize they aren’t all that different, and that they are all living in the wake of Kristina’s decisions.

I won’t lie, this book was a little hard to finish. It was just really hard for me to watch her three children suffer because of Kristina’s addiction. I understand that you have the ability to break the cycle, but like in Summer’s case, being sexually abused by a foster parent and then getting jostled around from house to house makes life incredibly difficult. It scared me a little bit when she started dating Kyle, who just like her mother, was at the mercy of the monster. I felt of all her children, Summer most reminded me of Kristina.

When they all get together at Christmas, Kristina included, it was less than perfect. Her children all made it very clear they had an unrelenting grudge against her for deserting them, and you know what? I sure as heck would to! If my mother abandoned me because she would rather go get high with her boyfriend, I would find it very hard to forgive her. That’s just an emotional void that is hard to fill. Not only that but knowing that Kristina’s addictive personality traits have resonated in her three children is heartbreaking. As I said, there are ways to break the cycle but they all three seem to have turned to some sort of substance abuse as a coping mechanism. It’s just really sad.

This book was a little more promiscuous than the previous two, and the craving for sex from the children was a little disturbing. It seemed as though they didn’t have a lot of restraint. In the end, her children did somewhat manage to realize they all needed help with their moral compasses and throughout the book were generally upset with themselves for their decisions. It’s an intense novel, but overall a good ending to this trilogy. It is classified as a young adult novel; however I would be more cautious to let a young teenager read this book than the previous two. 

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Glass by Ellen Hopkins

(Crank trilogy, book 2)
One little bit, my heart revs

High, then settles into quick-

Step mode. How I’ve missed

That race and pound. How

I’ve missed the lack of control.

Crank. Glass. Ice. Crystal. Whatever you call it, it’s all the same: a monster. Kristina thinks she can control it. Now with a baby to care for, she is determined to be the one deciding when and how much, the one calling the shots. But the monster is strong, and before she knows it, Kristina is back in its grip…and it won’t go away.

WARNING: This book contains sexual situations, drug abuse, and profanity.

Glass picks up right where Crank left off; Kristina is now seventeen, a mother to a little boy, and still battling her meth addiction. She gets a job at a convenience store and considers herself strong enough to choose when and how much she uses; she has a baby to take care of, and she only uses enough to get her through the day. Little by little, she finds herself falling back into the iron grip of the monster. She returns to Albuquerque to visit her father, and is introduced to a new, pure form of meth: glass. During her visit she also meets Trey, a fellow glass user/dealer and potentially the love of her life. She also begins dealing with the Mexican Mafia in order to maintain an income, most of which is spent on the exact drugs she’s selling. Any sense of normalcy Kristina attempted to maintain at home in Reno quickly goes out the window, and her life goes with it. Her mother kicks her out of the house when her baby gets hurt while Kristina is getting high, she turns her back on her son and her family, and actually robs her mother’s house with her boyfriend, Trey. Kristina and Trey continue their tumultuous relationship that consists of fighting and getting high; they are eventually picked up by the police, hauled off to federal prison, and await trial for distributing glass. While she is in jail awaiting her sentencing, she finds out that she is pregnant with baby number two.

If you read my review of Crank, you know that I had really high hopes that Kristina would turn her life around after she found out she was pregnant. Glass makes it very clear that walking away from the monster isn’t that easy. Kristina seems to think that because she also has the “high” of her baby loving her, she will be able to control her addiction and only use when she decides it’s necessary. She won’t let the monster sink it’s claws into her again…but it does. She finds herself even farther enveloped this time, and ends up way too deep dealing for the Mexican Mafia. In the first book, I was constantly rooting for Kristina and still thought there was good in her if she could only get free of the monster’s grasp. In Glass, my view of her took a really negative turn. As she says, it’s not easy to walk away from a drug that powerful, but when she didn’t even care that her mother was obtaining legal custody of her son, I wanted to smack her. Granted, Hunter is in much better hands with her mother caring for him rather than her and Trey.

Kristina goes a little more depth with the change in her appearance in this book; in Crank, she mentions that she loses a significant amount of weight but in Glass, she lets the reader know that isn’t the other toll the glass is taking on her physically; While brushing her teeth one morning, she notices her gums are bleeding and her teeth are starting to rot, and while staring in the mirror, we learn that her face has become incredibly hollow and her cheeks are now covered in sores. Yuck.

I’ve become spellbound by Kristina’s story, and still hold out hope that maybe she’ll finally get her life together for baby #2. Glass, along with the first book in the trilogy Crank, is written in verse which allows for quick reading. The honesty and devastation in Kristina’s story is an excellent cautionary tale for young adults. 

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