Impulse

It begins very straightforward enough.

After a brief prologue, we're suddenly thrust into the frenzied narration of three teens' suicide attempts. Bipolar Vanessa's choice of self harm is the blade, and one night she just happens to cut too deeply; Conner, with the seemingly perfect life, shoots himself and misses his heart, staining the expensive carpet; and almost too-gay-to-function Tony tries to overdose to escape his juvie hall life, but wakes up in a pool of his own vomit. So to treat all their troubled minds, their families haul them off to Aspen Springs, the lovechild of a rehab center and an asylum. They encounter many other patients, but are seemingly magnetized to each other.

The problem lies within three things that are supposed to hold a novel together: plot, characterization, and style. The idea has been done so many times in books and movies alike (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Girl Interrupted) that we expect to be given something new and fresh from something so recent, but are forced to be content with age-old cliches. Hopkins also seems to have a misconception that the more plot twists, the better, so she endlessly uncovers secret after secret about the characters that end up becoming ridiculous as the story goes on. All of it seemed too contrived, way too fixed to resemble the insanity her characters claim they have. There's no start, build up, climax, and ending per se, as all of it just rushes by in the last part of the book, leaving you empty - and not in a good way.

The main characters themselves were, if not caricatures, far too fond of changing their personalities and points of view so quickly that it can hardly be called development. All-American Conner's parts all consist of name-dropping brands to hint at his wealth, his fetish for older women and talking about how screwed up he was, cutting Vanessa rambles on about inheriting her mother's mood swings but is always flawless and composed to those around her, and Tony was a self-proclaimed homosexual until he does a 180 when he falls for a girl, with a speed that's almost offensive to those who had to spend their lives battling with their orientation. The secondary ones were dubbed with nicknames the moment they were introduced, quickly confining them to the boxes all three narratives made for them. Particularly disturbing observations points to Dahlia, a sex addict who is treated like a verbal punching bag because of her promiscuity; the psychiatrists Dr. Starr and Dr. Boston, one who is known for looking like a bulldog and one for her breasts, both characterized by their looks; and how all the mothers seem to be the root of all three characters' problem. As the common saying goes, one is an event, two is a coincidence, and three is a pattern.

And finally, there's the way she wrote it. It's written in free verse, like her other books, so that it almost reads like poetry. The POVs are indicated by stating the character's name on the top of the page, and they alternate repeatedly until the very end. For one, writing in the voice of one character is difficult enough. Handle three, in first person and no obvious speech differences among them, makes them sound exactly alike - and that's what happened. They all became so interchangeable, especially with Hopkins' poetic narrative breaking through all their voices. Considering that she was writing two males of different sexualities, and a girl who is a different sex altogether, it should have not at least been all similar. There aren't as many memorable lines or creative formats for her verses, which weakened the quality all the more.

Definitely not Hopkins' best work, nor as impulsively brilliant as the title leads us to believe.