Description: Based on a real-life event and written in verse, this novel relates the disturbing story of one girl's descent into addiction.

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Children's Literature Review: This devastating story, told in poetry, is even more frightening because it is based on the author's own experiences with her addicted daughter. As the author says in a note at the beginning of the book: "It is hard to watch someone you love fall so deeply under the spell of a substance that turns him or her into a stranger. Someone you don't even want to know." That is what happens to the narrator, a teenager whose life deteriorates after she gets involved with friends who use drugs -- she cannot resist crank even though she understands it is destroying her. She will do anything for more crank. She has casual sex, she gets drunk, and eventually she gets pregnant. She thinks she should get an abortion, but at the last minute she decides to have the baby. Her family helps her through the pregnancy and she tries to keep sober, but in the end, after the baby is safely born, she returns to what she calls "the monster." This horrific story is told in many pages, but actually not so many wor...

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