Hopkins Delves into the Realities of Life

By Arika Malichanh

“Tricks,” a teen fiction novel by Ellen Hopkins, is a book of stories told in the perspectives of five teenagers. As they live and tell the stories of their lives, their stories slowly start to intertwine. Driven out by their families, they all must find ways to survive alone in Sin City, Las Vegas.

Three girls and two guys are all searching for the love and acceptance that they crave because their families have not provided the best lives for them. Their parents are one reason why they begin lying, running away, and ending up on the streets. How far will these teens be willing to go in order to find love and acceptance?

The characters find themselves in serious situations that teens face every day such as sex, drugs, prostitution, gambling, and rape. One of the characters, Ginger, goes through an experience that leads her to run away to Las Vegas with her best friend, Alex. They become exotic dancers in order to provide for themselves. Alex ends up going further than stripping, and enters the dangerous job of prostitution. She is raped and then robbed, which results in her financial ruin and pregnancy.

Throughout the book, all of the characters find love and lose it. They learn how the words “I love you” can be misleading and that they cannot always trust the person who says these words, even if that person is a parent.

The characters deal with traumatizing experiences that the book explains in vivid detail. It also contains a small amount of offensive language. Those that are offended by scenes that contain intense sexual activity and foul language would probably be better off reading something different.

Like other books that are written by Hopkins, “Tricks” was written in a poetry format. While in other books, one is forced to read between the lines, Hopkins’s books are explained well enough that you do not need to concentrate as hard in order to understand the message. The way the words flow freely across the page draws you in and enables the reader to mentally envision the situation that a character is currently experiencing.

Overall, I thought “Tricks” was an excellent book. I would recommend it to almost anyone who is looking for something good to read. It is a serious page-turner, and I often found myself unable to put it down for hours on end.