But is it to hell or to a better life? For the first time Pattyn starts asking questions. Raised in a religious yet abusive family, a simple dream may not be exactly a sin, but it could be the first step toward hell and eternal damnation. But Pattyn Von Stratten is not like most teen girls. Nothing exceptional, just a typical fantasy about a boy, the kind of dream that most teen girls experience. I do know things really began to spin out of control after my first sex dream. 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.

But it is in each other, and in themselves, that they find the trust, the courage, the hope to break the cycle.

As each searches for real love and true family, they find themselves pulled toward the one person who links them together Kristina, Bree, mother, addict. Doubt and loneliness overwhelm her, and she, too, teeters on the edge of her mother s notorious legacy. To her, family is only abuse at the hands of her father s girlfriends and a slew of foster parents. Summer doesn t know about Hunter, Autumn, or their two youngest brothers, Donald and David. And the consequences of her decisions suggest that there s more of Kristina in her than she d like to believe. When her aunt gets married, and the only family she s ever known crumbles, Autumn s compulsive habits lead her to drink. Autumn lives with her single aunt and alcoholic grandfather. He’s struggling to understand why his mother left him, when he unexpectedly meets his rapist father, and things get even more complicated. 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.

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, Autumn, and Summer three of Kristina Snow’s five children live in different homes, with different guardians and different last names.

Closer to nowhere by ellen hopkins