Tilt by Ellen Hopkins

Any one who knows me, which is actually a very limited number of people, knows that Ellen Hopkins is one of my favorite authors. She writes about realistic teen issues in a way that does not sugar coat anything and gives a hard core, true insight into many of them. So, when her latest book came out, I was very eager to read it.

This book centers around three teens, all connected (this to be explained later) by various incidents in their lives. First we have Mikayla. She is seventeen and madly in love with Dylan. Their love is that passionate, first teen love. They are all about each other and all over each other. In a very predictable way, Mikayla ends up becoming pregnant. She must decide what to do with the baby and then deal with the effects this decision will have on her relationships.

Next up is Shane. Shane is a homosexual teenage male. He has to deal with his sexual orientation on top of having a four year old sister who is diagnosed with spinal muscular atrophy, meaning her body is  slowly deteriorating. We follow Shane's story as he deals with the illness of his sister and finally finding love.

Finally, we have Harley. Harley is a fourteen year old girl who is dealing with her dad getting remarried. She is also dealing with coming of age and getting attention from boys. Naturally, she is attracting the wrong type of boy and ends up passing out and being raped by her "boyfriend" Lucas.

Now, if my descriptions of these characters and their problems seem a little bland and detached, it is because that is exactly how I feel. Normally, I find Hopkins' works so riveting and get so emotionally invested in her characters that I have, on more than one occasion, cried at the end of her novels. But this one, I just didn't care. If I hadn't had this book on loan from the library, I probably would have set it down and walked away from it for a while. I just didn't feel that character development, that need to connect to the character, to empathize, to care. To me it was like people watching at the mall. You are observing, slightly interested, but in the end you really don't care about them.

I did find out, upon reading the ending note, that this is a companion novel to her first adult (and no, not in a fifty shades kind of way) novel Triangles. Though I have had this book over a year (shush Katherine Elizabeth!), I have not read it. I am wondering if I had read Triangles first whether or not I would have been able to connect to the characters in Tilt better. I say this because one of the annoying things about this book is that it hints at the parental issues affecting the character's decisions, but doesn't clarify what those issues are. So, I was annoyed at that the whole time. But, it is through the adults in the novel that the characters are connected. I am intrigued to decipher these connections, so I will be reading Triangles soon.

So all in all, I did not love this book. I didn't even really like it. I did not take much way from it, and do not feel as though I was affected by it at all. It just was.