This book contains sexually explicit excerpts involving minors. There are also excerpts containing explicit child rape and abuse; illegal drug abuse; graphic violence; underage alcohol consumption; and adult and child prostitution.
Tricks, the 98th most-banned book in the USA between the years 2010 and 2019, jumped to 3rd place in 2022, a year when book challenges, censorship, and bannings mounted at a unprecedented pace. Ellen Hopkins, who wrote it, is arguably in the running for America’s most banned author, Tricks being but one of her young adult titles in the crosshairs of Moms for Liberty and similar groups.
Tricks tells the story of five fictional high schoolers who through bad choices and misfortune find themselves homeless and on the streets, selling their bodies to survive. Teenaged prostitutes. The kids, three girls and two boys, come from different walks of life and different parts of the country. Through various twists and turns they find themselves abandoned and alone on the streets of Las Vegas, Nevada. None are over the age of 16; none ever dreamed they’d sink so low. Through sheer coincidence, these five sad lives converge toward the end of the story, which I gather continues in the second installment, Traffick (2015), where Hopkins, per the Goodreads blurb, “takes us on five separate but intertwined journeys through the painful challenges of recovery, rehabilitation, and renewal to forgiveness and love. All the way home.”