Impulse

Literary fiction

First published: 2007
Print length: 688 pagesSimon Pulse, 2008

Description

Conner, Tony, and Vanessa meet in a psychiatric hospital after surviving suicide attempts, each carrying a history that resists easy explanation. Conner is a gifted athlete trapped beneath his family’s demand for perfection. Tony has endured neglect and abuse, then lost the mentor who offered him stability. Vanessa feels responsible for her younger brother while living with the effects of her mother’s crisis and a fractured home. As treatment forces the three teenagers to confront what brought them into care, friendship and attraction complicate their efforts to imagine lives beyond the hospital. Told in shifting free-verse voices, the novel gives their pain an urgent, compressed form while examining trauma, secrecy, connection, and the difficult work of choosing to continue.

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

Fragmentary · Lyrical · Poetic · Spare

Pace

Moderate

Tone

Dark · Earnest · Hopeful · Intimate

Structure

Braided

Focus

Character · Relationships · Voice

Emotional intensity

5 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

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

Themes

FamilyFriendshipMental healthSurvivalTransformationTrauma

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: 9781416903574

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