Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Burned by Ellen Hopkins

It all started with a dream. A simple dream about a boy that most teen girls experience. But Pattyn Von Stratten is not like most teen girls. Raised in a strict Mormon family who believes that women are only good for childbirth and for serving their husbands. And the only kind of boy a Mormon girl is allowed to marry, or even date, is a good Mormon boy. Pattyn might, outwardly, have the perfect family and the imperfect life, but her father is an abusive alcoholic who hits her mother, and terrorizes Pattyn nad her seven other sisters. After that one dream, Pattyn changes, and begins to question her religion, how it treats women as servants, and how unfair it seems. She begins to see a non-Mormon boy, and is caught in a situation with her father, who threatens to kill the boy if he ever touches Pattyn again. Pattyn becomes so angry and frustrated, she breaks a girl’s nose, and ends up breaking a window and becoming suspended. Her family decides to send her to an aunt she doesn’t even know, so that she can find “redemption” and “salvation.” However, she finds love she would never have known in her Aunt J, and her true love, Ethan. During those few summer months, she is at her happiest, until a letter from her favorite and closest sister and a phone call from her father brings her crashing down to reality. Now she must go home, away from the happiness and love of rural Nevada back to the cruelty of her home and her father. Ellen Hopkins, the author of Cran, writes another heart breaking and provoking story, in verse, of a girl who has never felt loved or has loved, who finds love an acceptance in the last place she would think to look.
–Olivia R.

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