Twice Baked Thursday (4): Impulse

Twice Baked Thursday is an original weekly meme created here at Cardigans, Coffee and Bookmarks.  This feature was created because Randi and Becky, often read the same books and have very different opinions about them.  When we read the same book we do a joint review on it, showing both sides. Our reviews will "talk back" to one another, one reviewer writing in another color text. Please feel free to join us and link to our blog in your post, and also use the widget below to link your own double-review to our page.

 Title: Impulse  

Author: Ellen Hopkins

Genre: Contemporary Realism (issues book)
Audience: Young Adult

Pages: 688

Source: Library; own (of course!)

Rating: 3.5 I'd stalk this book on Facebook (Becky)

              4 I'd take this book for coffee (Randi)

Format: 

The format of this book was unique.  It was written entirely as a poem, or multiple poems as the case may be.  I'm actually largely ambivalent towards poetry if not outright hostile towards it.  Why did I read this book you ask?  My tricksy co-blogger talked me into it...BAHAHA. and I somehow missed the fact that it was poetry until I checked it out (oops). Hehehe. After the first few pages it read like any other book with just a bit more attention to language and rhythm.  Yes! It is told in verse, but it's different from other verse books I've read in that (at least I thought) the lines were very free-form and lacking "structure." It's definitely a unique structure though, and I really enjoyed it.

Characters:

This was a completely character-driven story following Conner, Tony and Vanessa.  Their lives are horrible, their personalities complex, and their situation is tragic.  I was most interested in Conner, possibly because his life (minus the abuse) most closely resembles my own. And he's a fraternal twin, too!  It could also be that he seemed more complex due to his comparatively tolerable life.  It's easy to see why victims of extreme physical or emotional abuse might become suicidal... less so a boy from suburbia. Until the last 150 pages or so, I felt kind of ambivalent about Conner. 

I did find both Tony and Vanessa fascinating in the beginning but they began to be annoying in the last hundred or so pages when love apparently solved all their problems in an instant. I loooved Tony and Vanessa! I felt the too-easy ending thing too, but at the same time, I so badly wanted them to find happiness and a way out of their horrific lives that I kind of overlooked it. ;) The secondary characters saw little to no development.

Plot and Pace:  

I don't often read books on suicide because they often seem to me to be romanticizing it.  This book was no exception, honestly.  I didn't buy the neat wrap up for some characters, and everyone's issues eventually seemed to wind down to sexual abuse or confusion.  In real life, some people commit suicide because they are chemically imbalanced even after growing up in a family that loved them. I would actually argue that Vanessa fits here, with the exception of her mother as a loving parent. While the problems of these characters are certainly possible, they felt overdramatized. That didn't really bother me other than the fact that it seems three really screwed-up teens happen to find each other. It would be interesting to know more about the secondary characters to compare and see what their "issues" were since we get so little info on them. Despite being rubbed the wrong way in that respect, I found the pace engrossing and whipped through the book in two days. That's another thing about the formatting - despite being a whopping 666 pages, it FLEW by. I read the last half of the book in maybe three hours.

Tone 

The tone was gritty but dramatic.  I never quite felt like I was reading a "real" story, possibly in part because of the dreamlike effect of the poetry format.  This book is what I'd refer to as a "candy" read, despite its dark subject.  It was addictive and interesting but the message fell flat. I would agree with the message part. In fact, I'm not sure I really got much message, though there were some lines I wanted to mark (and would have were it not for the fact that I'm out of stickies!) And the candy thing? Yes. I found this totally addicting, much the way I feel about candy. :) It's very dark and sad (and I teared up more than once), but somehow it wasn't a "depressing" read for me like other books sometimes are. Overall...I'm definitely going to be reading all of Ellen Hopkins' works as soon as I can!