Tricks by Ellen Hopkins is further proof that Ellen Hopkins is made of awesome and is a brilliant writer. She writes a lot of tough stuff, and she writes it honestly. I could say a lot about Hopkins brilliant poetry, but it's all been said before. I've said it before. So this time, I'm going to focus on the characters, and their stories. (Although the poetry really is genius.)
Tricks is the story of 5 teenagers. Some of them come from normal, happy families, some of them do not. Each of them have something they struggle with, and that struggle ultimately leads them on a path that none of them ever expected to take.
Our main characters are: Eden, whose father is an Evangelical preacher, and whose mother is abusive, hypocritical, and self-righteous; Seth, a gay teen struggling to accept himself in a small mid-west town, where everyone, including his father (and his dead mother), believes homosexuality to be a sin against God; Whitney, a girl struggling to be herself in the shadow of the 'perfect' older sister, loved and coddled by her workaholic mother, ignored by her mother, and desperate for someone (anyone) to love her; Ginger, who has spent her whole life looking after her younger siblings while her mother earns money as a prostitute; and Cody, whose awesome mom, and lovingly supportive step-dad are keeping a secret that will change their family forever.
While each of these characters have their own independent struggles, they are, for the most part, surprisingly well-adapted and well rounded characters. They all seem like good people. But it was incredibly scary to watch how quickly their lives spiraled down into disaster. It's amazing to me to see how fast it can all fall apart.
As you might have heard, or guessed from the title, this is a book dealing with teen prostitution. I don't know anyone who actually believes that this is a life that could ever touch them. I admit I myself have wondered how anyone could reach the point where they would be willing to sell their bodies to support themselves. It boggles my mind. But now, after reading this book it scares me. Because it can happen to anyone. None of these characters set out with the idea that becoming a prostitute was a great way of life. Ginger personally abhors it, because of her mother and the damage it has caused to her mother and their family. But each of them finds themselves in a situation where they don't believe they have any choices left.
Each of these stories are strongly emotional, which, I believe is the real strength to Ellen Hopkins writing style. I've read many books written in poem form and have never felt the emotion in the writing that seems so effortless in a Hopkins novel. Each character is painfully real and demands that we see them as real people, with real feelings, and real struggles. They dare us to judge them. Dare us to say we would have done any differently and beg us to understand and love them anyway. There is depth to these characters, not just on the pages, but that pores out around us. We need more writers like Hopkins that understand what it means to live, to hurt and to keep on anyway.