Crank

Literary fiction

First published: 2004
Print length: 537 pagesMargaret K. McElderry Books, 2013

Description

Kristina is a high-achieving student when she leaves Reno to spend the summer with her father in Albuquerque. There she meets Adam, tries crystal meth, and encounters the drug as “the monster,” a force that rapidly reorganizes her desires and identity. Returning home addicted, she begins calling herself Bree, a bolder alternate self who pursues drugs through unstable relationships with Brendan and Chase. Dependence exposes her to coercion and sexual violence, while dealing, juvenile detention, and mounting conflict with her mother narrow her choices. Written in free verse with shifting arrangements on the page, Crank renders addiction as both a physical compulsion and a divided inner voice, tracing how experimentation becomes an escalating struggle over agency, family trust, and survival.

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

Direct · Experimental · Fragmentary · Poetic

Pace

Brisk

Tone

Dark · Intimate · Tense · Unsettling

Structure

Fragmented · Linear

Focus

Character · Plot · Voice

Emotional intensity

5 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 2 / 5
Ideas: 3 / 5
Structure: 4 / 5
Background knowledge: 1 / 5

Themes

AddictionFamilyFreedomIdentitySurvivalTrauma

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.

Series

Crank Series · Book 1

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry Books
Language: English
ISBN: 9781442471818

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