Tilt (Ellen Hopkins)

Tilt
Ellen Hopkins
Margaret K. McElderry Books
9/11/2012
Purchased

Grade: B
Audience: Older teens






Synopsis:

Love—good and bad—forces three teens’ worlds to tilt in a riveting novel from New York Times bestselling author Ellen Hopkins.

Three teens, three stories—all interconnected through their parents’ family relationships. As the adults pull away, caught up in their own dilemmas, the lives of the teens begin to tilt….

Mikayla, almost eighteen, is over-the-top in love with Dylan, who loves her back jealously. But what happens to that love when Mikayla gets pregnant the summer before their senior year—and decides to keep the baby?

Shane turns sixteen that same summer and falls hard in love with his first boyfriend, Alex, who happens to be HIV positive. Shane has lived for four years with his little sister’s impending death. Can he accept Alex’s love, knowing that his life, too, will be shortened?

Harley is fourteen—a good girl searching for new experiences, especially love from an older boy. She never expects to hurdle toward self-destructive extremes in order to define who she is and who she wants to be.

My thoughts:
I have been an Ellen Hopkins fan for years. Her book, Burned, is what originally created my love for books written in this format. I usually enjoy that her stories are usually told from multiple perspectives. This book just had too many peoples stories going on for me to give it the "A" I would have otherwise.

There are three main characters, as shown in the above synopsis. That is a great amount. You would be able to connect with each character if the story remained that way. It does not. At the end of each little section there is one page where an outsider butts in. Not the same outsider over and over. This is where way too many people get involved. It truly bugged me and made things too complicated.

Despite all that craziness I still really enjoyed this book. I liked that the three main characters were connected yet were still not close. They helped me to gain an insight into how they saw each other. It was a great way of reminding the reader that how the outside world sees you can be totally different from how you see yourself.

This story was an accurate portrayal of how one little thing can change the course of your life. We watch the characters start to spiral downhill, unaware of the consequences of their actions until it is too late. In some ways a warning, and in others just a fabulous book.

I recommend this book to older teens. There is sex, drugs, drinking and swearing but that does not take away from the story.