Fallout

New York Times–Bestselling Author: The Crank trilogy concludes with a “gritty, gripping” novel following three damaged children of a meth-addicted mother.

Hunter, Autumn, and Summer—three of Kristina Snow’s five children—live in different homes, with different guardians and different last names. They share only a predisposition for addiction and a host of troubled feelings toward the mother who barely knows them, a mother who has been riding with the monster, crank, for twenty years.

Hunter is nineteen, angry, getting by in college with a job at a radio station, a girlfriend he loves in the only way he knows how, and the occasional party. As he struggles to understand why his mother left him, he unexpectedly meets his rapist father, and things get even more complicated. Autumn, plagued with OCD and panic attacks, lives with her aunt and alcoholic grandfather. But when the only family she’s ever known crumbles, Autumn’s compulsive habits lead her to drink. Summer doesn’t know about any of her siblings. To her, family means abuse at the hands of her father’s girlfriends and a slew of foster parents. Doubt and loneliness overwhelm her, and she, too, teeters on the edge of her mother’s notorious legacy.

As each searches for real love and true family, they find themselves pulled toward the one person who links them together—Kristina. But it is in each other, and in themselves, that they must find the trust, the courage, and the hope to break the cycle.

Told in three voices and punctuated by news articles chronicling the family’s story, Fallout is the stunning conclusion to the trilogy begun by Crank and Glass, and a testament to the harsh reality that addiction is never just one person’s problem.

“Hopkins shifts the point of view from meth-user Kristina to her three teenage kids; it’s a brilliant tactic that shows just how deeply others are affected by a single person’s addiction . . . Hopkins’ free-verse stanzas are as engaging as always, though prose this observant and strong would be powerful even if arranged in standard paragraphs. An emotional, satisfying end (and a new beginning, in a way) to Kristina’s story.” —Booklist