Candy

Grade 9 Up–Joe is boring. He lives in a comfortable London suburb. He does alright in school, but shows no real promise. He plays in a band, but is less than passionate about music. Then he meets Candy. She is 16, beautiful, addicted to heroin, and a prostitute. She's also the only girl ever to look at him twice. He convinces himself that he loves her, and tries to get her off smack and the streets. Her enormous, terrifying pimp is very unhappy with Joe, and tries to murder him and everyone he loves. Brooks's plotting is masterful, and the action twists and builds to a frenzied and violent climax. Unfortunately, much of the book leading to this climax is filled with Joe's simpering, prosaic inner monologues. The author embellishes the teen's narration with stanzas of fragment or one-word sentences, which are more pretentious than dramatic or pointed. For all the fuss made over her, Candy's character is underdeveloped. If readers assume the book isn't about her, but how she changes Joe, her lack of nuance makes some sense. The shame is that he is the same humorless robot before and after risking his life for her. The minor characters–Joe's sassy sister and her tough, good-guy boyfriend–are so smartly and lightly drawn that they elicit more emotion than Joe and Candy.–Johanna Lewis, New York Public Library

Gr. 9-12. Brooks' fourth novel, another provocative, suspenseful work that thrusts an average teen into an intense situation, invites inevitable comparisons with the film Traffic. When Candy, a girl "with the kind of smile that rips a hole in your heart," speaks to suburban teenager Joe outside a London train station, he falls hard but senses something amiss: her pupils are "like pinpricks." She cowers when a rough-looking black guy cuts their conversation short. Candy, it turns out, has a candyman, a pimp who provides the pretty addict with heroin. Joe gets involved (he can't help it; "[he's] hooked"), nursing Candy through cold-turkey detox and sinking into a seedy quagmire of danger and desperate violence. Joe's alternately love-drunk and rueful voice will keep readers engrossed; less easy to accept are Brooks' formulaic plotting, occasionally deliberate symbolism (Joe's future brother-in-law, a smart, compassionate black man, seems present solely to counterbalance Candy's terrifying pimp), and limp ending. But the questions that flicker across Joe's consciousness will speak powerfully to the YA audience, and the story plays skillfully to teens' curiosity about the mechanics of addiction and its manic, lurid subculture. Jennifer Mattson
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