A book review of Tricks by Ellen Hopkins

I wanted to like this.  Sort of.  My mom picked it out at the library, and she's really good at picking books I like.  And it's a book written in verse-I love poetry.  Yes, I admit, my standards for poetry are ridiculously high, but this didn't even start to measure up to what I normally read.  Maybe I've read too much Emily Dickenson. 

In Tricks, it seemed like all the characters were nearly the same.  They either do something their parents don't like, don't like their parents and fight with them constantly, or get rejected by their parents.  Then, four out of five of the characters run away.  Not just running away to a friend's house, no, they run away to Vegas.  Except for the character who already lives there, because he's in the right place to be able to meet other characters. 

For the first twenty pages, I liked it a little.  Then, after two hundred pages I was sick of it.  I made myself finish it because I had already taken so much time to read two hundred pages, I might as well finish it.  After three hundred pages, I put it on my windowsill and forgot about it for a few weeks.  A few nights ago I decided to finish it, just to get it over with. 

For a while, I even considered skimming the chapters about the characters I was interested in and seeing what happened to them.  I am glad that I read all of the book instead of skipping some, but only because if I hadn't read Cody's parts, I wouldn't know who Misty was, and she came up in other later chapters. 

Maybe I didn't like it because I couldn't identify with the characters.  At all.  Ever.  They would drink or do drugs, and I would never drink underage or do drugs.  Ever.  No matter what.  They were also very concerned about having a boyfriend, and one of them even ran away with a boy she barely knew.  Seriously, who does that?  That's the sort of storyline Lifetime Channel movies are made of. 

Also, I wanted a little bit more detail about what happened after the story ended.  Like, what happened to Cody?  Was Whitney okay?  And a little more about Ginger's future would have been nice. 

I don't plan on reading any other books by this author.  Actually, I plan on looking through my bookshelf to find Neverwhere and reading that again instead.