Glass

Overview

Glass picks up where Crank left off, following Kristina as she tries to build a stable life around her infant son. She wants to believe she can manage her use of methamphetamine on her own terms, treating it as something she can pick up and set down at will rather than a force that has already reshaped her life once before.

Written in Ellen Hopkins's signature free-verse style, the novel traces how quickly that resolve erodes. The pressures of parenting, exhaustion, and the pull of old patterns wear down Kristina's sense of control, and the drug reasserts itself as the organizing force in her days.

What follows is a portrait of relapse rendered from the inside: the rationalizations, the narrowing world, and the widening gap between the mother Kristina wants to be and the choices addiction leads her to make, including decisions that put her son's care in other hands.

Continuing a Story of Addiction

As a direct sequel, Glass extends the project Hopkins began with Crank: using poetic form to render the interior experience of addiction rather than simply narrating its external consequences. The verse structure mirrors its subject, with the drug's presence functioning almost as a character in its own right, one that speaks to Kristina in her most vulnerable moments.

The book is often read alongside its predecessor as part of a larger arc in Hopkins's body of work, which returns repeatedly to adolescence, dependency, and the ways young people navigate crises that adults around them may not fully see. Introducing a child into Kristina's life raises the stakes of that arc, shifting the story from one about a teenager's self-destruction to one that also asks what happens to the people who depend on her.

Why Glass Has Been Challenged

Objections to Glass center on its unflinching depiction of drug use and addiction, including detailed descriptions of methamphetamine's effects and the behaviors it drives Kristina to. Critics have also pointed to sexual content and depictions of neglect involving the infant character as inappropriate for younger readers, along with the book's frank, often bleak language throughout. The novel has been challenged or restricted in 10 states and 34 districts represented in this catalog, with objectors generally arguing the material is too mature for school libraries and classrooms, while defenders note that the story's unsentimental portrayal of relapse is central to its value as an honest account of addiction rather than a glamorization of it.