| An excerpt from Impulse: Without Warning Sometimes you’re traveling a highway, the only road you’ve ever known, and wham! A semi comes from nowhere and rolls right over you. Sometimes you don’t wake up. But if you happen to, you know things will never be the same. Sometimes that’s not so bad. Sometimes lives intersect, no rhyme, no reason, except, perhaps, for a passing semi. |
| Impulse is the story of three young people whose lives intersect in a psych hospital, after separate attempted suicides. It is about the things that brought them there, but more about the bond that forms between them. Can they help each other move beyond their personal demons? |
| Review from MySpace.com Impulse deals with teen suicide—or, more accurately, attempted suicide, since most of its characters end up alive and better off than they were at the book’s beginning. The book is set at a psychiatric hospital for teenagers, “a place no reasonable person would ever want to go.” The three main characters each have their own problems and ideas about how they want to die. Bipolar cutter Vanessa, whose “demons…keep on howling, like Mama, when she was in a bad way,” slit her wrists. Gorgeous, rich over-achiever Conner, who believes that “trust is just another five letter word, one that comes before not,” shot himself in the heart. Charismatic Tony, the homeless “boy with the hellfire eyes,” intentionally overdosed to end a life of unspeakable abuse. At first, the three seem to have “nothing in common except age, proximity, and a wish to die.” But as they discover each other’s innate decency and share their histories of neglect and physical, emotional, or sexual abuse, they forge bonds that although deep and real may not be enough to save them. Hopkins has said that her “books are not about the things that happen to…characters, but rather about how those characters react to those things.” This is a perfect description of Impulse, a tragic yet hopeful, compulsively readable journey into three bright and damaged kids’ interior lives. |
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| Identical tackles perhaps the most difficult subject matter of all. It is about identical twins whose father is sexually abusing one of them. I chose this subject matter because the issue touched the lives of three of my friends. Today, they are successful, beautiful women who you would never believe this might have happened to. I want readers to know it is possible to find a way beyond this terrible place, into a brighter future. |
| An excerpt from Identical: Raeanne Mirror, Mirror When I look into a mirror, it is her face I see. Her right is my left, double moles, dimple and all. My right is her left, unblemished. We are exact opposites, Kaeleigh and me. Mirror-image identical twins. One egg, one sperm, one zygote, divided, sharing one complete set of genetic markers. On the outside we are the same. But not inside. I think she is the egg, so much like our mother it makes me want to scream. Cold. Controlled. That makes me the sperm, I guess. I take completely after our father. All Daddy, that’s me. Codependent. Cowardly. Good, bad. Left, right. Kaeleigh and Raeanne. One egg, one sperm. One being, split in two. And how many souls? |
Identical received starred reviews from Kirkus and Publishers Weekly: Hopkins’s gift with free verse reaches new heights in this portrait of splintered identical twins. . . . Kaeleigh and Raeanne maintain distinct voices throughout as they wrestle with psychic damage and an astonishing, devastating realization. Sharp and stunning, with a brilliant final page. [starred review] —Kirkus Reviews Hopkins's verse is not only lean and sinuous, it also demonstrates a mastery of technique. [starred review] (Publishers Weekly ) |