Hopkins sharply portrays extreme adolescent turbulence with her biggest cast yet, as five disparate, desperate teens are sucked into the Las Vegas world of selling sex. Indiana farm boy Seth is kicked off his family’s farm for being gay; optionless, he follows a controlling sugar daddy to Vegas. In Boise, Eden’s first romantic relationship spurs her “hellfire-and-brimstone-preaching” Pentecostal parents to declare, “You are obviously possessed by demons,” and send her to Tears of Zion reform camp, where unwilling sex is her only hope for escape. In California, Whitney craves male attention, while Ginger realizes that the rapes she’s endured throughout childhood were orchestrated by her mother for cash. Cody’s in Vegas, already drugging and gambling but crushed when his stepfather dies. All five are “spinning. Spiraling. Clinging to / the eye of the tornado.” Hopkins’s pithy free verse reveals shards of emotion and quick glimpses of physical detail. It doesn’t matter that the first-person voices blur, because the stories are distinct and unmistakable. Graphic sex, rape, drugs, bitter loneliness, despair—and eventually, blessedly, glimmers of hope. (Fiction. YA)
