Ellen HopkinsPoetry · Young Adult·b. 1955
Traffick
Synopsis
In Tricks, Ellen Hopkins introduced five teenagers and the separate roads that brought each of them into sex work in Las Vegas. Eden, the preacher's daughter who turns tricks and is helped into a child prostitution rescue. Seth, the gay farm boy disowned by his father, left with no money or resources other than his own body.
Whitney, the privileged kid coaxed into the life by a pimp, her dreams ruined in a heroin haze. Ginger, who runs away from home with her girlfriend and is arrested for soliciting an undercover cop. And Cody, whose gambling habit forces him into the life, and who is shot and left for dead.
Traffick picks all five of them up afterward, and asks the toughest question of all: is there a way out? It follows five separate but intertwined journeys through the painful work of recovery, rehabilitation and renewal — toward forgiveness, and toward love.
Traffick is the sequel to Tricks, written, like all of Ellen Hopkins's novels, in free verse. It was first published in November 2015.
How it reads
Prose complexity 4/10
Content warnings (7)
TraumaSexual AssaultAbuseSubstance AbuseSexual ContentViolenceGun Violence

