Book Review: Traffick

                                                               Traffick Review

Traffick is by Ellen Hopkins and is the sequel to Tricks and it follows the same five characters as they deal with the fallout of the first book and try their best to recover and move forward with their lives which is easier said than done. Cody who's life hang in the balance at the end of the last book is alive but paralyzed from the waist down which is something that understandably makes him feel like things are hopeless and that everyone should just give up on him because maybe he deserves what he got. Ginger is in a sort of halfway house for teen girls forced into child sex trafficking while she waits for her grandmother to take her back home which will be considerably safer now that her mother can no longer work as a hooker since she's dying of HIV. Seth has now found a new man to be a kept man for but one that allows him more freedom and this time he's playing things safer than he was before and he's thinking about a future outside of sex work. Whitney is trying to beat her addiction to heroin as well as Bryan as she deals with the PTSD that she got from what Bryan put her through. Eden is staying and working at a safe haven for teens who got involved in sex work as well as deciding to contact the people from her life before and figuring out what to do about the people at the camp she was sent to.

This novel is one that I think was a very good and much needed sequel to Tricks since this book mainly dealt with getting out of and recovery from sex work which I think is something that people need to see is possible even if it's hard and sometimes dangerous to do. This book was still plenty gritty and raw like the first one was but it had a more optimistic feel then the first one because it shows that even if you went through Hell or you're damaged you can still find ways to move forward with your life in a positive way.

In this novel I found that the characters who's stories I was most invested in were Cody, Whitney and Seth. It surprised me a little bit who my favorites were in this book because in the first book Cody and Whitney annoyed me to no end but seeing them own up to their mistakes and struggle to move forward with their lives changed my opinions on them. Overall I really loved this novel and I would like to know what you thought of this novel or the first.