Fallout

Told in three voices and punctuated by news articles chronicling the family’s story, this “gritty; gripping” (Publishers Weekly) conclusion to the New York Times bestselling Crank novel-in-verse trilogy is a testament to the harsh reality that addiction is never just one person’s problem. Hunter, Autumn, and Summer—three of Kristina Snow’s five children—live in different homes with different guardians and 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 and 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. He’s struggling to understand why his mother left him, when he unexpectedly meets his rapist father, and things get even more complicated. Autumn lives with her single aunt and alcoholic grandfather. When her aunt gets married, and the only family she’s ever known crumbles, Autumn’s compulsive habits lead her to drink. And the more bad decisions she makes, the more it becomes apparent there’s more of Kristina in Autumn than she’d like to believe. Summer doesn’t know about Hunter, Autumn, or their two younger brothers, Donald and David. To her, family is only 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 sibling searches for real love and true family, they find themselves pulled toward the one person who links them together—Kristina; Bree, mother, addict. But it is in each other, and in themselves, that they find the trust, the courage, and the hope to break the cycle.