Crank Blog

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Crank follows the story of a young girl that becomes addicted to drugs while visiting her father and when she comes back home she is having to deal with her addiction. I think this is both a good novel to teach students and a bad one. One one side, the novel is written in verse which could be helpful in getting students to be more open minded towards reading and writing poetry. But on the downside, this book deals with many complicated subjects ranging from sexual frustrations and parental issues to hard drug addiction and rape. This is one of those novels that could potentially 'trigger' someone is the worse kind of way. While I think this book would be difficult to teach, I think that exposing the harm that drugs can inflict on one's life could help turn many students away from them. 

I think that one issue that is prominent is Kristina's life is the complicated relationships she develops with male characters throughout the novel. First, she goes to visit her father because she wants some form of reconciliation from the man that walked out on her. When she discovers that his intentions with love are completely vacant, she becomes obsessed with Adam because throughout the first section of the book, he can be described as a short of dark knight that comes to her rescue. Then, Brendan takes advantage of her financially and sexually. While Chase Wagner initially seems like the worse of the bunch, he is one of the few that senses how far Kristina is willing to go to chase that high and refuses, but he does let her run wild on her birthday doing drugs. Finally, the only male character in the story that seems to be a good role model and Kristina doesn't like him. While he is probably not the best parent, it seems like he has Kristina's best interest at heart.

I think that split personalities could be a potential topic of Crank. While Kristina maybe not have two personalities that live inside of her like the character from the movie Split (2016), she has developed an alter ego that she uses to pretend like she's tougher than she really is. Bree is more of a mask that she puts on to hid her true self when she wants to get involved with the world of sex and drugs. Bree is used by Kristina to try and mature before she is really ready. This is what creates 'the monster' that lives inside Kristina that is the personification of Kristina's addictions. 

I think that overall, this is a difficult book to assign to children, but I would recommend this to any older high school to help warn them of the dangers of drug addiction. I think that this novel has important topics that are tough to cover in high school. The story is told through poems that can be seen as Kristina's inner thoughts making it seem more personal, making the story seem all the more real. 

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