Reading Rants! Out of the Ordinary Teen Booklists!

Smack, a brilliant druggie novel out of England, chronicles the lives of Tar and Gemma, two teens who run away from home in search of freedom from their parents and authority. What they find is a squatter’s paradise and an addiction to heroin that ends up being stronger than their love for each other. Burgess slowly develops his characters, showing the gradual but devastating effect that regular drug use can have on a human being’s personality and mind. Gemma and Tar became so real to me that I had a hard time leaving them to their fate at the end of the book. No, they don’t die. But sometimes, learning to live after addiction is worse.