Junk

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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. They move into a small house in the countryside ( Rob's mother owns it) far away from all the drugs. There is only an little bit hash in their luggage to come down slowly. But they don't know that Rob has something with him which he shares neither with Gemma nor the others and when the withdrawal symptoms torment Tar too much he leaves his friends and hitchhikes home to Bristol. The ne xt day the others give up too which causes another row between Lily and Gemma who blames the pregnant girl not to care about her baby. At home Gemma has a talk to Tar where she tells him how he has changed and that she loves him the first time. Synopsis: Gemma runs away from home because her parents are too strict, Tar runs away because his father hits him. Different reasons, but the same end result. They become addicted to heroine and will do anything to get a high. Over the span of five years we are taken through their lives and meet the same people that they do, from addicts to the few that want to help them. The story is set in the 1980's and focuses on the problems of young runaways and the temptation of drugs, especially heroin. Tar and Gemma are only fourteen when they decide to run away from home; Tar has been physically abused whereas Gemma cannot put up with her parent’s strict rules anymore. The two end up in Bristol and befriend some people who believe in opening up squats in empty homes and peaceful protesting but ultimately the two get pulled away from these friends in want of more excitement and fall in with the destructive couple, Lily and Rob.

Our academic experts are ready and waiting to assist with any writing project you may have. From simple essay plans, through to full dissertations, you can guarantee we have a service perfectly matched to your needs. View our services Gemma Brogan - Tar's girlfriend, a rebellious fourteen-year old, who runs away with him. She later becomes a prostitute and a heroin addict. The point about novels - good novels, anyway - is that help you understand other people, with all their faults and shortcomings. The people who are scared of understanding are the dangerous ones. What would today's Burgess would tell his 10-year-old self? He immediately exclaims, "'Calm down! Don't worry so much, it's going to be alright!'"By the way, if you’re reading this? Don’t cut yourself. I am being completely honest when I say there are better ways of dealing with things. You don’t have to harm yourself to feel better. You don’t have to starve yourself or get drunk or shoot up. Talk to someone you trust and they will help you through whatever shit it is that you’re going through. All the things you never dared, all the things you dream about, all the things you were curious about and then forgot because you knew you never would. I did 'em, I did 'em yesterday while you were still in bed, I only know that I wouldn’t want my children to read this. I’d only want other adults, adults who know who they are and what they want out of life to read it. Adults who have decided whether or not they’re into drugs, alcohol, self-harm. Adults who won’t be swayed by such a sweet message.

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." At the start of the book I really loved the character Tar but less so Gemma. I felt she was very dependent and her life that she thought was so bad was just her parents caring about her unlike Tar. At the end of the book however that had completely changed. I could really empathise with the people who in real life I would avoid at all costs. But even though Junk has been pretty much a reading chore/horror and that (as mentioned above) I had to often really force myself to continue my perusal, there is also something rather strangely and oddly compelling in Junk and how with the multiple narrators, Melvin Burgess realistically and with a clear and present anti-drug message chronicles how substance abuse starts and how at least in its initial stages, there is usually something irresistible and even seemingly wonderful to it, but that what follows is of course devastatingly destructive, with the teenaged runaways and varied narrators of Junk being shown by the author, being described by Burgess as totally losing their souls, their personalities, their self-respect (although throughout Junk Melvin Burgess also never judges his characters and also never pontificates, which does for and to me make the anti-drug use stance hiding below the surface of Junk much stronger and much more persuasively believable, much more compellingly tragic, as is the fact that in the author's note Burgess points out that albeit his story is fictional, Junk is in fact loosely based on actual people and incidents). One of the things that I think is still a big taboo in YA stuff is politics, and there's a reason for that: politics is about taking sides," he says. "It can be about revealing things and telling the truth but, in the end, it's about taking sides; being partisan, in a way. And yet novels are good about being partisan because they ask questions rather than give answers. But it can be done: Orwell did it, people have written really good political novels – and we shy away from it."Other than Gemma or Tar, I found the characters to be somewhat poorly developed. I especially wanted to hear more from Rob. I felt like he was just kind of there. I wanted to know how he felt, particularly as his relationship with Lily evolves. **I won't spoil it** Chasing the dragon ... yeah. It’s like Chinese magic. That smoke, that’s your Chinese dragon, and when you breathe that dragon in and he coils about in your veins, like Lily said, you feel better than anyone else ever did - Gemma Lily - a fifteen-year old heroin addict who takes a liking to Gemma. She grew up in the care system and it is hinted that she, too, suffered abuse.

The last cry of help is his visit of Richard. It's obvious that he wants to get away of everything bad, but the addiction is too strong so that he can't go through it without professional help.

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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. Guardian children's fiction prize relaunched: Entry details and list of past winners". The Guardian 12 March 2001. Retrieved 1 August 2012. But he meets Rob again and they go on a skip to find something useful, where they get caught by a policeman, but they manage it to get out of the situation. After that they look around the shops and Tar falls in love with a huge and expensive book full of halfnaked women in it which touches his creative artistheart.) Reread 2023: I still state that this is one of the first YA novels, and it's influence opened up so many doors and helped shape the world of YA into what it is today.

Who was his his childhood hero? Burgess smiles fondly. "When I was very young, I thought my dad was the best and he was great, my dad. He read to me, he looked after me and he had a great gift for language. He was Irish and he had a great turn of phrase." Burgess is circumspect about his own home counties upbringing. "I was very well treated as a child, but I don't think I found it very easy. In many ways, it's the most distressing thing - having no control over your life. That idea of happily playing away down by the river without a care in the world - children feel quite oppressed by the sense of powerlessness that they have." 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.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. Lily and Rob were the bad apples in this, they were really bad influences and reading about them was just like reading about two people who were literally 'gone' and who are past helping completely. Especially Lily. I mean, in real life, she'd scare me because she's just completely bonkers. She loves drugs so much that she even does drugs while holding her baby and then breastfeeds, and injects whilst pregnant. It's just awful.