Mateo’s self-awareness and inner monologue at times make him seem older than 16, and, with significant turmoil in the main plot, some side elements feel underdeveloped. He talks himself out of choosing a safer course of action, a decision that deepens the story.

Kimmie is half Korean (her other half is unspecified) and Adam is Italian American Mateo feels disconnected from them, less American, and with worries they can’t understand. Mateo’s relationships with his friends Kimmie and Adam (a potential love interest) also suffer repercussions as he keeps his situation a secret. The adults around Mateo offer support to him and his 7-year-old sister, Sophie, however, he knows he is now responsible for caring for her and the bodega as well as trying to survive junior year-that is, if he wants to fulfill his dream to enter the drama program at the Tisch School of the Arts and become an actor. The Garcias live in fear until the day both parents are picked up his Pa is taken to jail and his Ma to a detention center. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents show up unsuccessfully seeking his Pa at his New York City bodega. Mateo’s life is turned upside down the day U.S. YA)Ī Mexican American boy takes on heavy responsibilities when his family is torn apart. Graphic sex, rape, drugs, bitter loneliness, despair-and eventually, blessedly, glimmers of hope. It doesn’t matter that the first-person voices blur, because the stories are distinct and unmistakable.

Clinging to / the eye of the tornado.” Hopkins’s pithy free verse reveals shards of emotion and quick glimpses of physical detail. Cody’s in Vegas, already drugging and gambling but crushed when his stepfather dies. In California, Whitney craves male attention, while Ginger realizes that the rapes she’s endured throughout childhood were orchestrated by her mother for cash. In Boise, Eden’s first romantic relationship spurs her “hellfire-and-brimstone-preaching” Pentecostal parents to declare, “You are obviously possessed by demons,” and send her to Tears of Zion reform camp, where unwilling sex is her only hope for escape. Indiana farm boy Seth is kicked off his family’s farm for being gay optionless, he follows a controlling sugar daddy to Vegas.

Hopkins sharply portrays extreme adolescent turbulence with her biggest cast yet, as five disparate, desperate teens are sucked into the Las Vegas world of selling sex.

Tricks by ellen hopkins