Smack, Melvin Burgess

Did certain parts of the book make you feel uncomfortable? Why? Did this lead you to a new understanding or awareness of some aspects of your life you might have not thought about before?

I have to admit there were lots of parts in this novel that made me feel so uncomfortable and I could have grind down my teeth how shocked and in a way terrified I was in the situation the character's put themselves in. Maybe it's because I am a mother but when I was reading about Gems and Tar starting to shout up, in a way my heart dropped because the whole time I'm reading; I'm hoping they turn their lives around. I kept thinking ........ oh if I were their mother or all they needed was love. I feel for what they been through but also in a way I feel that two wrongs don't make a right. Everyone goes through situations that they feel they can never get through but, they do and life goes on with out having to turn to drugs as a way out.Knowing a teenager my age is shouting up heroin and making themselves think that they are in control, was a totally uncomfortable feeling, maybe because I was unable to help them. I'm the type of person that just can't sit back and watch something like that happen.
So reading all the different things they were doing to ruin their lives just made me cringe with discomfort.
Especially, when I read what Gems and her friends turned into to get money for drugs, prostitutes. All I could think was WHY? Teenage prostitutes and they still think that they are in control of the drug but in reality it was the other way around. It made me think....... wow this really happens everyday and to them it's life and that hurt. Even though I knew what was going to happen in the book but, I wanted to be proved wrong. I grown to understand and accept that everyone has to make their own choices in life and grow from them. That still doesn't mean that I approve or feel comfortable with it.