Title: Smoke Series: Burned #2
Author: Ellen Hopkins
Published: September 10, 2013
Genre(s): Realistic/Contemporary
Page Count: 543
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Pattyn Von Stratten’s father is dead, and Pattyn is on the run. After far too many years of abuse at the hands of her father, and after the tragic loss of her beloved Ethan and their unborn child, Pattyn is desperate for peace. Only her sister Jackie knows what happened that night, but she is stuck at home with their mother, who clings to normalcy by allowing the truth to be covered up by their domineering community leaders. Her father might be finally gone, but without Pattyn, Jackie is desperately isolated. Alone and in disguise, Pattyn starts a new life, but is it even possible to rebuild a life when everything you’ve known has burned to ash and lies seem far safer than the truth?
Smoke is an attempt to give closure to the characters from Burned, which ended extremely abruptly and unsatisfyingly. Yet while Hopkins definitely managed to give Pattyn and her sister Jackie and ending that felt “right”, I was only mildly invested throughout the book.
Though Hopkins’ free verse is always a quick read, her books are nevertheless long—in Smoke’s case, unnecessarily so. A lot of this story, to me, was repetitive and circular. Pattyn and Jackie were both extremely angsty/whiny (not without reason), which really began to grate. Yes, having the love of your life die is hard, but is life really over without him? When I got more than halfway into the book and Pattyn was still angsting about Ethan’s death, I started to lose interest. Not because her mentality was in any way unrealistic, but because being stuck in that kind of narrator’s brain is never enjoyable.
This is the first time I’ve read a Hopkins novel in electronic format, so that probably affected things, but what really stood out to me in Smoke was that so much of the text would have been better off in prose. The awkward line breaks did nothing for the flow or progression of the narration, and I really didn’t see much point. Ellen Hopkins has talent, but I wonder if poetry is her best medium 100% of the time. (Again, electronic formatting might also come into play.)
The biggest part of this book, and what kept me turning pages, was that the story switched off between Pattyn and Jackie’s perspectives. Oftentimes, there would be a sort of cliffhanger between sisters’ sections, which would propel me to keep reading to figure out what happened next. Other than that, however, I’m not sure how much I loved the dual-narrator aspect of Smoke. There was little to no differentiation between the two girls’ voices, and it seemed to me like their individual stories could have best been served if they’d been given individual books, rather than being smushed into one “story”.
All in all, Smoke succeeded in fixing things and putting the characters in a less distressing spot. Ellen Hopkins’ novels continue to be easy and quick reads that don’t require too much brain power, which is sometimes welcome. This isn’t the best book ever, sure, but I enjoyed reading it, up to a point.
