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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
From Publishers Weekly
This searing account of two young runaways' descent into heroin addiction and their faltering climb back out won England's Carnegie Medal and Guardian Prize for Fiction. Burgess's (Burning Issy) unflinching depiction of the seductive pleasures as well as insidious horrors of heroin will likely provoke controversy and heated discussion: some adults may feel that YA readers shouldn't be exposed to such unvarnished reality; others will recognize it as strong preventive medicine. Both would be conceding the power of the story in these pages. Self-absorbed Gemma, 14, bored with small-town life and her parents' strict rules, runs away to Bristol to join ingenuous, artistic Tar, who is fleeing an abusive home. They find lodging with some older youths in a squat until Gemma, and later Tar, moves in with her newfound "soul sister" Lily and boyfriend Rob, who introduce them to heroin. Though constantly insisting that they can quit any time, all become junkies, with the girls turning to prostitution and the boys to drug dealing, until Gemma makes a desperate bid for salvation. In telling the story through some 10 different voices, Burgess may well dazzle readers with the novel's flawless construction and his insights into character and relationshipsAmost notably Tar's metamorphosis from loving, gentle na?f into a copy of his violent, self-deceiving father. This is one novel that will leave an indelible impression on all who read it. Ages 14-up.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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