Smack - Softcover

Burgess, Melvin

3.91

21,046 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0380732238 ISBN 13: 9780380732234

Publisher: HarperTeen, 1999

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Gemma:"My parents are incompetent. They haven't got a clue..."

Tar: "I know it sounds stupid, but it was like the flowers had come out for Gemma..."

Lily: "They did everything they could to pin me down...my mum, my dad, school..."

Rob:"We stood for a while breathing big long breaths of air. It was cold and pure...You could feel it inside you, doing you good."

How do these teens come to run away from home? To be users? Addicts? As their stories intertwine and build, SMACK never lets up the pace. It is a book about people, families--real and those constructed by young people with no one to turn to but each other. SMACK is a book about a drug and the hold it can have. Written directly for its audience of young people and unflinching in its honesty, SMACK is the teen book of the year.

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Review:

Like so many teenagers, Tar and Gemma are fed up with their parents. Tar's family is alcoholic and abusive, and Gemma feels her home life is cramped by too many restrictions. The young, British couple runs away to Bristol in search of freedom, and finds it in the form of a "squat." This vacant building is also occupied by two slightly older teens who share everything with Tar and Gemma (including their heroin habits). For a while, everything is parties and adventures, but slowly Tar and Gemma find themselves growing more and more dependent on the drug--whose strict mandates are even less forgiving than those of the parents they fled. As Gemma says, "You take more and more, and more often. Then you get sick of it and give up for a few days. And that's the really nasty thing because then, when you're clean, that's when it works so well."

With Smack, winner of the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Prize for Fiction, Melvin Burgess brilliantly sketches a gradual descent into drug addiction. There is no preaching here, just the artful revelation of cold, hard facts. Burgess's use of the first-person voice--for not only the main characters but those in the background as well--brings you into the mind of every character in this homeless, hooked culture, offering a (sometimes terrible) glimpse of the motivations and transitions of each person. (Tar's personality changes dramatically over the course of the book, from sweet-natured, lonely boy to hard-edged, hit-seeking addict.) More subtle and less graphic than Beauty Queen, Linda Glovach's tale of a girl's downward spiral into heroin addiction, Smack will linger in the your mind long after its haunting conclusion has been reached. (Ages 13 and older) --Brangien Davis

About the Author:

Melvin Burgess is the author of many novels for young–adult and middle–grade readers. Among them are The Baby and Fly Pie, The Earth Giant, and Smack, winner of Britain’s Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Prize for Fiction, as well as an ALA Best Book for Young Adults. Mr. Burgess lives in Lancashire, England.

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