Burned

Author: Ellen Hopkins
Completed: 8/14/09

This book is about a teenage Mormon who undergoes a crisis of faith. She has always been a good, obedient daughter, the oldest child in a very large (and ever expanding) family. Her father is very controlling, and hides behind the tenets of his faith to justify his mentality. He is also an alcoholic and physically abusive, yet no one will stop him because he, as the male in a Mormon household, has complete authority. Abuse is a common occurrence in these families, according to this book, as the head of household needs to keep his family in line.

After getting into trouble on several occasions, the head of the local church suggests she be sent away to be rehabilitated. The family decides she must go because the mother is pregnant again, this time with a boy. She moves in with a relative, and finds caring and understanding that she had never before experienced at home. Unfortunately, as fiction is wont to do, nothing can ever stay wonderful, and disaster soon strikes.

This was the first book by Ms. Hopkins that I read. She is a poet, and her work is entirely in verse. At the beginning of the book, it was a little awkward to read because I haven't read a great amount of poetry since high school. But once I remembered how to read it, I really got into the story. It was nice that the words were not confined to the standard novel format, in that they could be shaped to represent the story being expressed on that particular page. The book was also approximately 550 pages, but it read much faster in that the verse accounted for only a few sentences per page.

10 words or less: Am currently reading all of her other fiction.