Tricks

About Tricks

Tricks is a 2009 novel-in-verse by Ellen Hopkins, published by Margaret K. McElderry Books. It follows five teenagers — Eden, Seth, Whitney, Cody, and Ginger — each from a different background, each in some way abandoned or driven out by the people and systems that were supposed to protect them, and each drawn by different circumstances into survival sex work in Las Vegas. Hopkins structures the narrative so that the five voices alternate throughout the book's 626 pages, building toward an ending that is both devastating and, for some of the characters, tentatively hopeful.

Eden is a devout pastor's daughter who runs from home after her father catches her with her boyfriend and sends her to a religious reform camp. Seth is a gay teenager whose evangelical father rejects him for his sexuality. Whitney is a suburban girl whose relationship with an older man spirals into exploitation. Cody is a desperate kid trying to help his family through a financial crisis. Ginger is escaping an abusive home. Hopkins refuses to flatten any of them into types — each character's trajectory is specific, credible, and informed by the particular pressures that shape their choices.

The novel's form — angled verse, shaped on the page, intimate and urgent — allows Hopkins to convey interiority with unusual precision. These are not victims as the word implies a passivity they never possess; they are young people making decisions under conditions designed to offer them no good options.

Ellen Hopkins's Body of Work

Ellen Hopkins is among the most challenged authors in American school libraries. Her novels — drawn in many cases from the experiences of people she knows, including her daughter — return repeatedly to the subjects that the most-banned-books lists reliably flag: drug addiction, sexual abuse, prostitution, mental illness, suicide, self-harm, LGBTQ+ identity. Tricks led directly to a companion novel, Traffick (2015), which follows the same five characters five years later.

Hopkins has been a visible advocate against censorship, speaking regularly about the readers who find her work in school libraries and for whom it serves as the only honest reflection of experiences they are living through. She has described receiving letters from teenagers — in juvenile detention, in foster care, in situations of exploitation — who describe her books as what they needed when nothing else acknowledged their reality.

Why Tricks Has Been Banned

Tricks has been banned or challenged in 15 states across 79 school districts. The challenges overwhelmingly cite the book's depictions of prostitution and sexual content involving minors, its language, and its portrayal of drug use. The fact that the characters include a gay teenager whose rejection by his family drives his homelessness has also been a factor in some challenges.

The irony — which defenders of the book note regularly — is that the readers most likely to recognize themselves in Hopkins's characters are the ones most likely to be in situations where they have the fewest safe adults to turn to and the fewest institutional resources. Removing the book from school libraries removes it from the environment where it might reach the students who most need to see their experiences treated with honesty and compassion rather than shame.