From: Carrie Schadle <bz227>
Date: Wed, 3 Jun 1998 17:54:19 -0400 (EDT)

I think that after years of "Just Say No"--which we all know doesn't work--at a time when almost inexplicably (to those not hooked) heroin use is up, _Smack_ is a super powerful anti-drug book. The detatchment that people have talked about is what makes it so powerful to me. You never have the feeling that you are being preached to, but instead feel like you are getting the real story. I think kids will eat this up, and maybe, just maybe, make them think twice about trying heroin. As a rule I don't like message books, but this book is a good, honest story first and just happens to carry a message. I know that the "heroin-chic" thing is over, and this book will help to de-glamorize it even further. Maybe it seems more real to me because I live in a neighborhood positively littered with teenagers who have run away from home, many of them just looking for their next fix. There is nothing glamorous about having to step over them on the sidewalk on my way down the street, just like there is nothing glamorous about Gemma and Tar's lives. The lack of sympathy I think many of you felt for especailly Gemma is pretty much how I feel about these kids, because though I know they need help and hope that they make it, it makes me crazy to think they left their nice lile suburban houses to sit on the sidewalk and beg for change to pay for cheap beer and facial piercings. I suspect many of them would recognize much of what goes on, especially the downslide that Burgess has portrayed so well.

I know I am not addressing the book from a literary standpoint, and that this has been a little disjointed, but I'm in a hurry and I wanted to get my two cents in (like always!).

******************************** Carrie Schadle Jefferson Market Regional Branch, New York Public Library bz227 at freenet.buffalo.edu 212/243C34
Received on Wed 03 Jun 1998 04:54:19 PM CDT