Tricks

Literary fiction

Print length: 627 pagesMargaret K. McElderry Books, 2009

Description

Five teenagers speak in separate verse narratives that gradually converge as private wounds push each of them toward dangerous choices. Eden hides a relationship from her minister parents; Seth, grieving his mother, questions his sexuality after meeting Loren; and Cody drinks while confronting uncertainty about his origins and his stepfather’s failing health. Alongside them, Whitney struggles with parental absence and emotional disconnection, while Ginger carries the secret of childhood rape and examines her feelings for a friend. The shifting voices trace how loneliness, desire, family pressure, sexual exploitation, and drug use can narrow a young person’s options. Gritty and direct, the verse form keeps each perspective intimate while revealing the forces that begin to bind these lives together.

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 · Fragmentary · Poetic · Spare

Pace

Brisk

Tone

Bleak · Dark · Earnest · 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: 4 / 5
Background knowledge: 1 / 5

Themes

AddictionFamilyIdentityIsolationSexualityTrauma

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: Margaret K. McElderry Books
Language: English
ISBN: 9781416950073

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