Smack by Melvin Burgess

Burgess, Melvin. Smack. Avon Books, 1996. ISBN 0-380-73223-8

Plot Summary

Tar and Gemma are a teenage punk rock couple in Bristol that run away together. Gemma, is a brat who does not want to live with her ‘overbearing’ parents while Tar leaves his abusive father and alcoholic mother. They begin to live there lives as squatters where they are introduced to Lily and Rob, heroin addicts who take Tar and Gemma under their wings. Tar and Gemma are looking for adult figures in there lives to feel a sense of family. Lily and Rob fall deeper into heroin and often doing anything for money, such as selling drugs or her body to afford it. This is not the life they really wanted but they do not care as much since they are not living with there parents anymore. Gemma gets a job at a health parlor making decent money. Tar and Gemma begin to do heroin as well but it is not all fun and games. Gemma loses her job as the customers can see her track marks and Tar gets arrested for drug possession. The foursome realizes the toll that drugs are taking on them and try to quit but that cannot handle the pain of the withdrawal symptoms, so they continue there drug use. Lily ends up pregnant and has a baby while she is addicted to heroin so the baby comes out addicted as well. Lily has to rub heroin on the babies gums to keep it from crying. The four of them are living these destructive lives of addiction but they do not care anymore until a traumatic event happens where they all are apart from one another. Will this separation help them stay clean?

Critical evaluation

Depicts heroin addiction in its most rawest form often times becoming vey descriptive and shocking. Tar and Gemma were an innocent couple at home but once the squatting began they were introduced to one of the most hardest drugs on the market. Burgess does not glorify the use of drugs at all in this novel. He purely states everything the way it when one dwells deeper and deeper into drugs. Drugs are seen as destructive forces that do not have any cool connotation to it. It often has descriptions that are disgusting but true for heroin addicts. The life of heroin addicts not pretty and Burgess makes that quite clear. The novel starts off slow but picks up after the couple begins to do heroin. The book goes back and forth between being clean and sober which is annoying but at the same time realistic. There are no hit it and quit its when it comes to heroin. This is a raw portrayal of heroin abuse that will have the reader cringing and never wanting to do smack.

Readers Annotations

Gemma and Tar are a punk rock couple that runaway together to escape there parents and enter a life of squatting and drugs. While squatting they meet another couple, Lily and Rob who introduce them to heroin. There heroin addictions cause there lives to fall apart and might cost them there lives.

Information About the Author

Burgess is the winner of the Carnegie Medal and Guardian Prize for Fiction

Genre

Drugs use and Abuse

Curriculum Ties

English

Booktalking Ideas

1) Gemma first person narrative

2) Effects of heroin

Reading Level/Interest Age

13+

Controversial Subject Matter and Defense of Ideas

Drug Usage

Does not glorify drugs, explains the horrors of addiction.

Why Book Included

I loved this book as a teen and wanted to know if I still felt the same way about it now that I am older.