Smack by Melvin Burgess

SMACK

By Melvin Burgess

            “Smack” is a story with many real world issues.  Gemma a 14-year-old girl runs away with her boyfriend Tar.  Soon they meet 16-year-old couple Rob and Lily and move into a squat with them.  Starting off with small drugs such as marijuana, Gemma and Tar soon escalate to class A drugs; heroin.  To afford their “hobby” Lily and Gemma become prostitutes, and Rob and Tar deal a little on the side.  The story goes through all their challenges, until Gemma is pregnant and her and Tar go home at 18 to raise their kid.  In this book Gemma, Tar, Rob, and Lily all have several ways of coping with big and small situations, some good and some bad.

            The obvious way all of these characters cope in common is running away.  They all ran away from home at very young ages (Lily 12, the rest 14) for their own reasons.  But that’s not the only time they ran away from problems in their life.  When Tar and Gemma are in their first squat with Richard, Vonny and Jerry, as soon as they don’t like it anymore they meet new people and leave in the middle of the night, no explanations.  “’ I ought to go away… and leave him because maybe he’d stand a better change without me.’” (Page 256) This was when Gemma wanted to run away from Tar so he could get clean.  Another way the characters deal with conflict, is when Tar is upset, he goes and paints.  “I went back to my room and I got out the pastels… and had a go at the dandelion.” (Page 143) Tar dealt with his emotions by pouring them out into his drawing.  He didn’t stop for hours.  A less positive way to deal with issues is when they were tight on money.  “There was a big handful of tenners [money] coming down from the ceiling… Rob grabbed the notes and went bombing off to get some [drugs]… We said, ‘we’ve been little prossies [prostitutes] for half an hour.’” (Page 184).  This was in the beginning when it was only an occasional thing, but they quickly found a gig daily.  There are other ways characters deal with issues, such as Rob’s skills in stealing, the drugs, drug dealing and the occasional phone call home.

            Those are some of the examples of how characters in the book dealt with issues in their lives.  Some of those were harmful to them, or dangerous, but others were simple ways that many people can relate to.  All in all, "Smack" was a very good book, with an interesting plot and issues, and characters you could feel sympathy towards.