Burned

Literary fiction

Print length: 532 pagesSimon Pulse, 2007

Description

A young woman growing up under an abusive father and strict religious expectations has little room to imagine a life of her own. She questions the authority of her family, the faith used to contain her, and whether love can ever be mutual rather than controlling. After a school suspension, she is sent away to live with an aunt she scarcely knows in rural Nevada. The change brings acceptance, affection, and unsettling new insight into her father's behavior, but distance cannot erase the forces that shaped her. Written in verse, the story gives compressed intensity to her search for belonging as a promising refuge collides with unresolved fear, family power, and the consequences of seeking freedom.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Lyrical · Poetic · Spare

Pace

Moderate

Tone

Dark · Hopeful · Intimate · Tense

Structure

Linear

Focus

Character · Relationships · Voice

Emotional intensity

5 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 3 / 5
Ideas: 3 / 5
Structure: 3 / 5
Background knowledge: 1 / 5

Themes

BelongingFamilyFreedomPowerReligion and faithTrauma

About Ellen Hopkins

Ellen Hopkins is an American novelist best known for young adult stories told in free verse. Her pages use spare, fragmented lines, shifting arrangements, and sharply separated voices to compress experience and control pace. She returns to adolescents living under addiction, abuse, mental illness, sexual exploitation, and demanding families, with secrecy and divided identity often shaping the narrative as strongly as external events. In Crank, the split between Kristina and her bolder alter ego, Bree, gives methamphetamine addiction an internal grammar, while the changing verse layouts register compulsion and diminishing agency. Impulse moves among three teenagers in psychiatric care after suicide attempts, allowing their histories to emerge through alternating voices rather than a single account. Tricks expands that method to five narrators whose initially separate stories gradually converge. Hopkins began with nonfiction for children, but her verse novels established her characteristic scale: intimate voices set against pressures that accumulate through family conflict, coercion, grief, and unstable forms of belonging.

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Simon Pulse
Language: English
ISBN: 9781416903550

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