Junk

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Anyway, getting that out of the way with, this was required reading for university that I actually kind of dreaded reading because I don't tend to read things like this. Surprisingly, I quite enjoyed it! It follows two 14 year olds Gemma and Tar who run away from home to be together (although it's not very romantic because the girl is literally like 'I love you' then 'I don't like you' and it's proper frustrating) and they mix with the wrong crowd. As in, some other homeless youths who do heroin and, to sum it up, get them addicted. I didn't enjoy my teen years," he says. "I never met people who I really got on with until I had left school. It's not an uncommon experience. I did have friends because at school you needed friends to survive. You need to have colleagues; otherwise you are completely lost. So you do make friends but I now I have like-minded people around. So I would say: 'Hang on in there, school doesn't last forever.'" The POV's in this story are interesting because it's so many people throughout the story, and it's always cool to see what everyone's thinking in specific parts of the book with a topic like this. Parents, each of the heroin kids in the house, people they know who don't agree with the lifestyle, it's all fascinating. Sometimes I'm like 'wait, who is this again?' but that's because I don't always pay attention! My own fault. And truth be told, it really is an amazing book. Each character has such a distinct voice – and we jump around rather a lot. From a purely technical point of view, I don’t like how many different characters we jump into the POV from. Some of them seem completely irrelevant, telling a piece of the story that could have easily been told by someone else and therefore reduced the cast of characters. But then, I realised that each and every character has something important to say. Whether it’s a junkie trying to come down off a high or a lonely shopkeeper who visits prostitutes. It reflects the real world – Burgess even says so himself in a foreword: This is based on real stories, real events, and real people. People admit things in this book that they’d try to keep hidden from the other characters. Weakness. Shame. Regret. The smell of meat pie permeates the converted barn in Lancashire's Lune Valley, where the parents of his wife Jude are playing host. Burgess's own parents are outside, enjoying the gentle afternoon sunshine in the brightly bedded garden. His mother asks fretfully about the number of rude words in her son's interview.

Skolly - a tobacconist who introduces Tar to Richard. He later pays for sexual services from Gemma, although he does not realise who she is. If you need assistance with writing your essay, our professional essay writing service is here to help! Essay Writing ServiceThe German writer, Brecht, did the same thing as Orwell in his poetry, which was to write really simple stuff in speech rhythms rather than poetic rhythms and it was very truthful. Not all of it but some of it." Another was a guy called Mervyn Peake. Do you know Gormenghast?" I say no. "Oh, you should read Gormenghast. I've been praising truthful, simple things and Gormenghast is a fantasy written in a very Gothic style, with these long, gorgeous sentences, which just land on a sixpence. It was a character-driven fantasy and there's just nothing like it." Today, I don’t think Junk would get half so much publicity if published now. Doing It would though - people are still terrified of talking about the pleasures of sex with teenagers. Lust is not something people want their kids to read about. You can bet young people would read about it, though! Everyone else does. Are the problems faced by Tar and Gemma in Junk still applicable today?

It came as a surprise to me when it did so well. There was a huge amount of fuss when it won first the Guardian children’s fiction award, and then the Carnegie medal – both originally awards for younger children’s fiction. People on the inside knew that change was going in teenage fiction, but the press was taken completely by surprise. This is fiction for children? Help! What’s going on? Where had Ratty, Toad and Moley gone? It used to be Alice in Wonderland and Fluffy Bunny – now suddenly it’s junkie whores rolling round in the gutter. What happened to innocence? Above all, why are we subjecting our children to this sort of thing? I didn’t do it. By complete chance I accidentally opened a vein in my leg and bled all over my bathroom. My fiancée kept me calm and we eventually managed to close the vein. But the sight of all that blood scared me off thinking of cutting myself anymore.Why not? Fiction for young people had been moving that way for years… getting older, getting more serious, testing the waters. I was already known for hard hitting, honest books. Klaus, bless him, was up for it… It used to be Alice in Wonderland and Fluffy Bunny – now suddenly it’s junkie whores rolling round in the gutter Everyone insists marijuana is a gateway drug, but really alcohol is. It's more socially acceptable at least. I thought the author did a good job of portraying the characters in the story, and I also liked how he named each chapter according to the narrator, because I also do this in my Behind the Lives series. The internal monologues were well done, although at times they did get a little laborious. Nonetheless, the story was still captivating enough to get me through those moments. Melvin Burgess is a British author of children's fiction. His first book, The Cry of the Wolf, was published in 1990. He gained a certain amount of notoriety in 1996 with the publication of Junk, which was published in the shadow of the film of Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting, and dealt with the trendy and controversial idea of heroin-addicted teenagers. Junk soon became, at least in Britain, one of the best-known children's books of the decade.