Saturday, March 10, 2012

Book Review: Tricks

                                                              Tricks: Review
Tricks is a book by Ellen Hopkins who also wrote Impulse, Identical and Perfect, and it's about five teenagers and how they end up selling their bodies in order to get by in life. I found it interesting that none of the characters were in the business at the beginning of the book and that it took a couple hundred pages before any of them got involved in it. I loved that there were five different narrators and I loved that it was in easy to understand poems just like all of Ellen Hopkins other wonderful books I read. My favorite characters were Seth and Ginger because I just felt for them the most and understood why they made the decisions they did.

I found that while I had a lot of sympathy for Eden but that I didn't really care for her much as a character. Eden started out as a girl from a small town who has a minster father and her whole family is very religious. So religious that when they find out that Eden is dating this boy named Andrew (who is very nice and loves Eden as much as she loves him) her family believes she possessed by some evil demon and then her mother drugs her and drags her to compound in the middle of nowhere. In the compound the extremely religious people who run it decides to starved Eden and put her in isolation in order to flush out the supposed demon. These are the reasons I feel a lot of sympathy for Eden, she does nothing wrong and then she gets punished by a lot of crazy people.

I like that Eden was willing to do whatever it took to escape that evil crazy compound but I hated the things she had to due to earn her freedom which was to sleep with this pervert and even pretend to love him. I'm glad that by the end of the book she's done selling herself and isn't going back to her family who treated her horribly but I don't think she could be with Andrew again after everything that has happened to her. I didn't like her personality for some reason it felt a little too religious but also kind of fake but I'm not exactly sure why that is.

I loved Seth he is my favorite and I kept wanting to know more about him as the story went on. Seth is a gay boy from a small town in Indiana where no one is gay and at the beginning he is very much in the closet. I liked his relationship with Lorne at the beginning because he seemed to treat him well but I hated how Lorne left without saying goodbye and how he sent a letter to Seth's house when he knew Seth was still in the closet. I hated that Seth's father couldn't accept him for who is and that he had to be Carl's kept man and how lonely and empty that was for him.I hated how Carl treat him like property. By the end I still love him and I'm still worried about him but I'm glad that he has a job on the side because at least now if his new rich guy kicks him out he has a chance of being able to make it on his own.

Whitney makes the worst decisions and has the worst taste in guys which leads to her being a complete wreck. I had a sort of love hate relationship with Whitney because she had this kind of bitchy, bratty attitude but I think it's because she's deeply insecure and is overcompensating so I can understand and forgive her for that. She seems to think her mother and sister don't care about her and her dad lives a couple hundred miles away which makes her feel unloved and lonely which is why she makes most of the bad decisions she does. Her first boyfriend was a total high school jerk who only wanted to be with her because he never to did a virgin before and he made her do cocaine. I think she really shouldn't have done the coke because if he really cared about her he wouldn't have made her do something she didn't want and I don't think should have had sex with him because he made her wait for 2 hours after she told him she was ready(he said he would by over in just a few minutes) and he made her do coke first.

With Bryn I don't blame her as much for falling for him because played her well and even though I was sure the first time she met him at the mall that he was a pimp I started to second guess myself after she started dating him. When Whitney first started dating Bryn he was the prefect gentleman and that photo shoot on the beach was very sweet and romantic. While I think Bryan is total scum and I hate him I have to admit he's very smart with how he slowly progressed into making Whitney a hooker with at first taking nude pictures of her which sound like they were for his eyes only but in hindsight I think he was selling them to someone. Then he started having Whitney and him have sex on camera and this time Whitney knew he was selling those tapes but she was too in love with him to care. I think she should have left when he demand she take heroin (but at least she only smoked it at first) but I understand that by that point she was too in love with him and didn't have anywhere else to go so she didn't feel like she had any other options. I think by the point he brought other guys around for her to sleep with she had lost all power to refuse but I still wish she would have left then but understood why she couldn't.

As the rest of the book goes on Whitney admits to herself that Bryn's a pimp and is only using her to be whore for him but she can't leave because of her addiction and part of her still loves him. It was extremely interesting and depressing to see her continue to sink further into her addiction and how she started shooting up making her both look and feel more like a zombie as time went by. I'm glad that by the end she's in recovering and I was surprised in a good way to find out that her mom really loved her and I hope that Whitney can recover.

Ginger my second favorite she's the daughter of a prostitute named Iris who acts more like a selfish teenager than a mother which is why Ginger grew up acting as a mother for her siblings. I hated Iris and how she didn't care about her kids and how she sold Ginger in order to get more money. I totally understood why Ginger left but I understood why she felt guilty about it since she was leaving her siblings but at least she knew her grandmother would take care of them. I liked that Ginger refused to do more than strip for money and I felt bad for her when her sort of girlfriend Alex becoming more and more intertwined in the world of prostitution and ginger was pretty much helpless to stop her. I'm glad that Ginger was able to go home to grandmother and that with Iris having HIV it seems like she won't be able to  a prostitute anymore so I hope Ginger stays safe.

Cody I feel brought quite a bit of the money problems he had on himself because of all the gambling he did but on the other hand the other part of debt came from his step father's death which was really no ones fault. I was interested in his story and I always worried about how he, his mother and brother were going to get by. I felt bad for him when he had to start selling himself but I was mad at him every time he thought gambling would be a good idea because it only adds more problems to his life since he never knows when to stop. I'm sad that we don't know if he's ever going to wake up from his coma or if he's dead, I think this is why people say this book ends really opened ended.

I loved this book but I wish that more of the main characters would have interacted with each other like they have in her other multiple narrator books. Please tell me your thoughts on the book.

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