Review: Fallout by Ellen Hopkins

Fallout by Ellen Hopkins
*Book 3 of The Crank Series

•   Reading level: Young Adult
•   Hardback: 672 pages
•   Publisher: McElderry Books
•   ISBN-10: 9781416950097
•   ISBN-13: 978-1416950097
•   Received From: Borrowed from Friend

From Goodreads: 
Hunter, Autumn, and Summer—three of Kristina Snow’s five children—live in different homes, with different guardians and different last names. They share only a predisposition for addiction and a host of troubled feelings toward the mother who barely knows them, a mother who has been riding with the monster, crank, for twenty years.
Hunter is nineteen, angry, getting by in college with a job at a radio station, a girlfriend he loves in the only way he knows how, and the occasional party. He's struggling to understand why his mother left him, when he unexpectedly meets his rapist father, and things get even more complicated. Autumn lives with her single aunt and alcoholic grandfather. When her aunt gets married, and the only family she’s ever known crumbles, Autumn’s compulsive habits lead her to drink. And the consequences of her decisions suggest that there’s more of Kristina in her than she’d like to believe. Summer doesn’t know about Hunter, Autumn, or their two youngest brothers, Donald and David. To her, family is only abuse at the hands of her father’s girlfriends and a slew of foster parents. Doubt and loneliness overwhelm her, and she, too, teeters on the edge of her mother’s notorious legacy. As each searches for real love and true family, they find themselves pulled toward the one person who links them together—Kristina, Bree, mother, addict. But it is in each other, and in themselves, that they find the trust, the courage, the hope to break the cycle.
Told in three voices and punctuated by news articles chronicling the family’s story, FALLOUT is the stunning conclusion to the trilogy begun by CRANK and GLASS, and a testament to the harsh reality that addiction is never just one person’s problem.

My Thoughts: 

I have been a fan of Ellen Hopkins' books since I was 15 (so 5 years) and I was so looking forward to when the FINAL book in the Crank series was to come out. However, when I found out that it was going to be from Kristina’s children point of views I was a little disappointed. At first I had a hard time getting into the story because I didn’t know where she was going to take the plot of the story. It also felt like there was all this build up, towards the end, about the siblings being reunited and there wasn’t very much interaction between the three of them, which was a huge let down for me.

I also found myself skimming Autumn’s and Summer’s part of the story just so that I could get back to Hunter’s story. So more than once I had to make myself go back and actually read their part so I wouldn’t miss out on any information. The reason why I was doing this was because Hunter was a character in the first two books, so I was more invested in his character than I was in Autumn’s or Summer’s. I really wish she would have added another book between Glass and Fallout that dealt with the events that lead up to Kristina having Autumn and Summer. I feel like I missed a lot of information and I have a lot of questions as well.

My all time favorite thing are the newspaper clippings that update you on the characters from the first two books. I also really enjoyed the Brendan and Hunter meetings; I was wondering if that was ever going to happen and I’m happy with the way that they turned out!

I think that most of my disappointment came from the fact that I was expecting a story about Kristina and while Ellen Hopkins did answer all the major questions, she didn’t go into enough detail for me. So I am going to give this book, 5 quills because overall it was a really good book and I’m probably going to re-read it multiple times in the future.

<3 Shannon