BOOK: Smack

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.



anyone read it?
I loved it...but found it VERY depressing.

I'll check it out

Who's it by?

Melvin Burgess

Melvin Burgess

-_-
why does it do that...
sorry.

Miss Misfit:

Melvin Burgess

K, Thanks.

sounds like go ask alice (depressing). i might check it out.

GreenDay420:

sounds like go ask alice (depressing). i might check it out.

Ive read go ask Alice...
its kind of like it...
yeah, go ask alice is depressing too.

Yes!!!- i was afraid i'd have to make one about it... I'm about half way through it right now-when they are questioning Tar and Gemma and Col was in the ambulence. I don't know why but in my mind Rob looks exactly like Tim Armstrong...just without his 2 front teeth. So far i think its great, except the things that they keep doing aren't...

I just finished it literally ten minuets ago. Wow. I am kind of depressed about Tar. I really liked him at the begining...I was sad that he never became clean and would most likely be a junkie for life.The one person who deserved a better life...and Gemma was kind of a Brat at the begining and shouldn't have run away. Rob was OK, but it was kind of a shock to learn about the whole male prostitute thing...I really didn't like Lily at all. My faveoite character was probably Richard.This book is way more suttle, i guess, than Go Ask Alice, but nonetheless it hit hard. Smack ruins your life.It ruined my aunts. The drug is always stronger than you and Its better to stay the hell away from it. I'm guessing thats the overall point that Mr. Melvin Burgess was trying to get across...point taken.