I'm Such a Tease

You know what day it is, right? Of course you do... there's a big picture to the left that reminds you it's Teaser Tuesday. Yeah!

This is the great opportunity for you to open up your current book, pick out a two-line slice of pie and serve it up for others to chew on.

I'm over-playing the food analogy because the blog mistress who hosts Teaser Tuesdays has a tease up today from Mindful Eating. Anyway, here's my slightly less wholesome tease from Melvin Burgess' Smack:

"It was the weekend, not that I care what day it is. A day's a day. We got out of bed maybe one o'clock," (p. 115).

I know it doesn't seem very scandalous, but we haven't yet gotten to the part where two teenage run-aways get addicted to heroin... but it's coming.

Here's a summary of the book from GoodReads.com:

"Originally published in the UK as JUNK.

"Like so many teenagers, Tar and Gemma are fed up with their parents. Tar's family is alcoholic and abusive, and Gemma feels her home life is cramped by too many restrictions. The young, British couple runs away to Bristol in search of freedom, and finds it in the form of a "squat." This vacant building is also occupied by two slightly older teens who share everything with Tar and Gemma (including their heroin habits). For a while, everything is parties and adventures, but slowly Tar and Gemma find themselves growing more and more dependent on the drug--whose strict mandates are even less forgiving than those of the parents they fled. As Gemma says, 'You take more and more, and more often. Then you get sick of it and give up for a few days. And that's the really nasty thing because then, when you're clean, that's when it works so well.'

"With Smack, winner of the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Prize for Fiction, Melvin Burgess brilliantly sketches a gradual descent into drug addiction. There is no preaching here, just the artful revelation of cold, hard facts. Burgess's use of the first-person voice--for not only the main characters but those in the background as well--brings you into the mind of every character in this homeless, hooked culture, offering a (sometimes terrible) glimpse of the motivations and transitions of each person. (Tar's personality changes dramatically over the course of the book, from sweet-natured, lonely boy to hard-edged, hit-seeking addict.) More subtle and less graphic than Beauty Queen, Linda Glovach's tale of a girl's downward spiral into heroin addiction, Smack will linger in the your mind long after its haunting conclusion has been reached. (Ages 13 and older) --Brangien Davis"