Impulse -- reviewed by Faith Straub

Impulse
By Ellen Hopkins

The book I was reading is called Impulse; it had some interesting detail and some not so interesting detail. Impulse is about a few teenagers that have been through some hard struggles throughout life and have been majorly affected by it. The actions these teens chose to deal with the situation were not very good decisions, they chose self-harm or harm towards others. After choosing the decisions of suicide attempts, these three teens quickly became locked up in a psychiatric facility. They each live with a dark past filled with abuse but slowly they begin to open up to one another and build tight bonds. One of the main characters ended up killing his abuser, one character had sex with a teacher and the other watched his mentally ill mother die. Also in the story there is cutting, abortion, bi-polar disorder, over achieving and a character who thinks he is gay. At the end of this story it became pretty intense because one of the protagonists dies a really violent death. I myself didn’t like this book because it wasn’t something that popped, it wasn’t anything special. It got boring at points of the book, but the one thing that I did like about this book was the free verse writing, which was an interesting thing because it made the book easier to read and a bit easier to follow. One part that I did like about this read is the detail they put in when talking about what they have done to harm themselves and the detailing of what happens in a psychiatric facility. Like I said, the book itself wasn’t the best but some of the detailing it. Ellen Hopkins is an amazing author and she has some really great books, but this one just isn’t for me.