For me personally, this book is not very memorable. I am not a huge fan of poetry, but I thought it I would try it out anyway. With the poetry mixed in with changing point of views, it felt like a Walmart version of Jodi Picoult and Laurie Halse Anderson.
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This story is told from seven different perspectives: Violence, Cami, Rand, Ashlyn, Silas, Daniel, and Noelle. Don’t get me wrong, it is an intricately written novel with a huge message. But the way the author hypes up her own ending really threw me off once I read the last page.
The novel starts with a man accidentally shooting his wife, thinking she was an intruder. So the man sells the gun without a second thought, not caring about who bought it. The question posed throughout the whole novel is “The gun will fall into who’s hand?”
Will it be:
- Silas – the member of a teenage white supremacist group
- Ashlyn – Silas’s girlfriend who helps hunt immigrants in the white supremacist group (yes you heard me, I said hunt)
- Cami – who is a teenage mother married to Rand selling weed on the side to make extra money
- Rand – Cami’s husband who works day and night to support his family but has a dark childhood secret
- Daniel – who has a stepmother who hates him after his mom gets sent back to Honduras and constantly lives with resentment towards everyone
- Noelle – who now suffers with epileptic seizures and depression after watching her best friend’s dad get shot in the head over a road rage incident
After learning about all their pasts, it adds a bit of suspense and was extremely intriguing. I felt like Hopkins wrote nicely, but there wasn’t enough of a punch to her viewpoint. She hyped up the ending to be bigger than it truly was in my opinion. I felt like there were way to many questions left unanswered and a lot of fluff that wasn’t needed in the middle. I would have scored it lower if I didn’t agree with the overall message.
Although my rating is low, some people disagree which is totally okay. Some reviews given were:
- “Absolutely incredible. Hard to read at times because of the subject matter, but absolutely necessary.”
- “I’m always so incredibly impressed with Ellen Hopkins’ ability to emotionally wreck me. She is seriously one of my favorite writers. She always writes about something relevant and hard to read, always writes for the education and betterment of people. And she does it so well.“
- “This was a really interesting commentary on gun violence in the United States. I liked reading from the different perspectives (only because it provided somewhat of an insight into the minds of real people with similar beliefs) of the characters and I enjoyed how they were all distinct from each other but connected as well.”
- “Wow. She never fails to astound me”
However, an abundant of people did agree with me. Pretty much all the “negative” reviews do say that it is written beautifully, but there is something missing. Here are some examples of the reviews:
- “Wow, what a let-down. “
- “Thanks, I hate it.”
- “Ellen Hopkins always writes beautifully. This was no exception, an interesting combination of both story and verse about race and violence. I’ve read almost all of her novels, but this one didn’t impress me, nor grab me like her other ones.”
- “Before I got sick I finished People Kill People by one of my favorite authors ever (Ellen Hopkins) and I am just going to get this out of the way right now I was really upset and disappointed with this book and that is a totally new feeling for me with one of her books.”
I think the main reason why so many people picked this book up was because it focused on such a controversial topic. I congratulate Ellen Hopkins on taking a risk that some others would much rather avoid.
To read further on the statistics of Americans viewpoints on gun control, click here.
The controversy of gun control is something that has been argued about for years in the United States. This books demonstrates just how easy it can be to attain gun today, but tries to portray that the gun isn’t always the problem. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this aspect, but I can’t say I can blame the author. Pew Research says, “Similarly, a majority (70%) says that most or some types of guns should be legally available for sale in the U.S.; just 20% say almost all types of guns should be legally available, while only 10% say almost no types should be available.”
The other aspect of gun control is mental illness. I think that’s what makes this story so uncomfortable because some of the characters viewpoints are extremely crazy to me.
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Although this may not be my favorite novel, it was interesting to read. It was easy to get through word wise, but really makes the other think throughout the whole thing. However for me personally, it will not be a book that I pick up again.
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