“I’d been standing there thinking about daffodils somewhere else and all the time here were the dandelions—wild dandelions, not there for me to look at but there because they wanted to be.”
I read this book for one of my college classes, so going into it I had a bit of a bias. Since I like very few books that I read for school, I didn’t have very high expectations. My professor had given us a basic synopsis of Smack, so I ended up being somewhat intrigued. But as I said, I’m not always a big fan of school books, but I was hoping, as I always do, that I might end up enjoying this one.
Smack by Melvin Burgess is set in England, mainly Bristol, in the 1980s. It’s about two fourteen-year-old kids, Gemma and Tar, who decide to run away from their homes for very different reasons, and their road to becoming heroin addicts. Smack tells the story of why they ran away and what happens in the several years the book takes places in.
“I was going… I was going and it didn’t matter how many hearts I break—mine, theirs, anyone’s. In my mind I was already gone.”
While there are many characters within Smack, Gemma and Tar are who the story truly focuses on. Between the two, you can’t find more contrasting personalities. The most alike they ever get is when they’re both addicted to heroin and even that’s a stretch.
**While this spoiler is meant to be spoiler-free, it was hard to talk about the main characters without bringing up minor spoilers. If you have never read this book I would recommend skipping ahead to the next bold text to avoid any spoilers!!**
With Gemma you have this fourteen-year-old, wannabe punk. She’s the type of person that challenges any authority figure because she thinks she’s better than them, they’re holding her down, and/or they’ve been brainwashed by corporations and society. Once she runs away, she feels like she’s finally free and immediately spends nearly all the money she had to adopt a punk look for herself. The thing with Gemma is that, while she’s annoying and childish a majority of the time, she is also very aware of the world in a way you don’t expect a fourteen-year-old to be. I always sort of had these mixed feelings about her, one second she’s this naïve and highly immature girl, and then suddenly she’s spouting off very mature opinions and ideas. Gemma also went through one of the biggest and more surprising character arcs that I’ve had the opportunity to read. As the story goes on she ages to about eighteen or nineteen, and through that you continually watch her getting smarter, but at the same time she also has an uncanny ability to fall back into her old habits. It’s not until something major in her life happens that Gemma decides to make a serious change to her life. The biggest shock about Gemma, for me, was that she ended up being my favorite character.
It was Tar who started out as my favorite character. Tar is also fourteen at the start of the book and he loves art. He’s the type of person that might cry at the beauty of a sunset and you can’t help but root for him to make it through the story. Tar comes from an abusive family; his father provides the physical abuse and his mother the mental or emotional abuse. Despite that, he is one of the sweetest people in the world. For most of the novel, you can’t help but pity Tar. He is easily manipulated by the people in his life as he is an extremely codependent person, this is Tar’s fatal flaw. Ultimately, I do think Tar was better able to understand himself by the end of the book and could identify when he was being manipulated. While Tar also went through a huge character arc, I can’t say he was my favorite person by the end of the story. After a certain point in the book he, like Gemma, has a major shift in his personality. Whether you think that change for him is good or bad is up to you, personally I found it to be bittersweet.
**You have now entered a spoiler-free zone, happy reading!**
Honestly, I could talk about all the characters in Smack for pages and pages. However, in case you guys haven’t read the book yet, I’ll end my talk about characters here, so you can form your own opinions on them without mine plaguing your brain.
“She didn’t have to be offered anything; it was already hers. She was more herself than anyone else ever was and as soon as I clapped eyes on her I knew I wanted to be myself just as much as she was herself.”
Regarding the story itself, parts of it could be a bit confusing for me, simply because the story is set in England and words and phrases there can mean vastly different things than they do here in America. Luckily for me, there was a very handy glossary in the back of the book. This story is also told in multiple points of view, which was nice because you always get more than one perspective on a given aspect of the book. What I found most interesting about Smack was the ending. Though, I won’t say anything about it other than that it was the opposite of what I expected it to be.
Overall, I genuinely enjoyed Smack. As I mentioned in my initial thoughts, I have a bad streak of not liking books I’ve read for school, I am so glad that Smack did not live up to those expectations. It did a great job of keeping me interested in the story and the characters, and it also gave my class a lot to think about and discuss. I would recommend this novel to anyone that enjoys realistic and thought-provoking storylines.
★ My Rating: 4/5 ★
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