Junk

Product Information

Burgess won the annual Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, recognising the year's outstanding children's book by a British author. [4] For the 70th anniversary of the Medal, in 2007, Junk was named one of the Top 10 winning works, selected by a panel to compose the ballot for a public election of the all-time favourite. [5] Junk also won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, a similar award that authors may not win twice; [6] it is the latest of six books to win both awards. [a] Other than Gemma or Tar, I found the characters to be somewhat poorly developed. I especially wanted to hear more from Rob. I felt like he was just kind of there. I wanted to know how he felt, particularly as his relationship with Lily evolves. **I won't spoil it**

He is unwilling to put a lower age restriction on his work. Maturity is not a straight line, he argues, and childhood doesn't end on a given date. His own children - Pearl, 10, Oliver, 13, and his 15-year-old stepson, Sam - are bored by, rather than corrupted by, that which they can't contextualise. "The thing that worries me about them reading the books too early is that they don't get enough out of it." He's far more concerned about how Oliver relishes the Alien movies. Books, more than visual material, are self-censoring, he points out, given that you have to make the substantial effort of sitting down and reading the things. Before Gemma runs away too, Tar moves alone to Bristol where he first sleeps i n the street. But the meeting with Skolly, an old fat tobacconist, changes his situation. The man feels sorry for the boy and introduces him to Richard. Richard is an anarchist, who opens squats and makes ends meet by commiting little crimes such as stealing and selling TV-sets and so on. That night they squat a new house to live in and spend the whole night smoking joints and talking. Tar makes friends with Richard and two other punks. Vonny and Jerry also like Tar and so he decides to stay with his new friends. As he has a place to stay now, Tar invites Gemma to live with them and she doesn`t hesitate. Read more Do you think being regarded as a writer of ‘dangerous’ books has harmed or helped you as an author? He is a reluctant, if consistent, controversialist. In 1997, he encountered similar hysteria when he won the prestigious Carnegie Medal for Children's Literature with Junk, the story of two 14-year-old heroin addicts. "They're very vocal and they're bullies," says Burgess of his critics. "Nine out of 10 times they have a rightwing, religious agenda. I'm not terribly happy about it. I think if you're going to have a discussion about it, you can probably have a better one than this." Children are just made for growing. They're made to grow as people - mentally, emotionally and physically - and to start hindering that is ridiculous. It's a question of context and what they understand. Very young people can know about sex, but you present it to them in a way in which they can contextualise it. But there is still an attitude that sex is dangerous and knowledge of sex is going to corrupt them.The POV's in this story are interesting because it's so many people throughout the story, and it's always cool to see what everyone's thinking in specific parts of the book with a topic like this. Parents, each of the heroin kids in the house, people they know who don't agree with the lifestyle, it's all fascinating. Sometimes I'm like 'wait, who is this again?' but that's because I don't always pay attention! My own fault. My Thoughts: As with Nicholas Dane this story was very sad, but well-written and captivating. Though, I did like Nicholas Dane better, I still got very much involved in the lives of Gemma and Tar, especially Tar. He was by far my favourite character, even though he had many faults. He was the type of person that you wanted to wrap up in cotton wool and keep away from the bad crowd, because he was so easily led into things. He was also the only one in the story that captured my heart, his sweet personality taking a real hammering with what he went through. Our attitudes are mired in contradiction, he believes. "There's this great fetish about youth, particularly a sexual fetish. I suppose we must fancy them. Young people - not very young, but when they first develop - are very attractive. People get scared about it." But Lady is most notable as a book that dwells on the pleasures, rather than the consequences, of teenage sex. It's a conscious emphasis, says Burgess. "Why is it that, when you become a sexually active person, it can't be, 'You've got your first boyfriend, you've lost your virginity, the whole world's opening up for you, isn't that wonderful?', as opposed to, 'Oh God, you're going to get pregnant, get Aids, shag around and get your heart broken.' Sexual activity in people who've just discovered it is great, isn't it? Listen. You can be anything you want to be. Be careful. It's a spell. It's magic. Listen to the words. You can be anything, you can do anything, you can be anything, you can do anything. Listen to the magic.

Adults do have uneasy feelings about children," he says. "I don't know how much is to do with their uneasy feelings about themselves. As soon as you touch on drugs and sex, everything goes into overdrive. It's about kids having adult fun." Anyway, getting that out of the way with, this was required reading for university that I actually kind of dreaded reading because I don't tend to read things like this. Surprisingly, I quite enjoyed it! It follows two 14 year olds Gemma and Tar who run away from home to be together (although it's not very romantic because the girl is literally like 'I love you' then 'I don't like you' and it's proper frustrating) and they mix with the wrong crowd. As in, some other homeless youths who do heroin and, to sum it up, get them addicted.

If you need assistance with writing your essay, our professional essay writing service is here to help! Essay Writing Service I won't even start on the parents because none of them will get 'Parent of the Year' awards. Especially Tar's, JFC.

Synopsis: Gemma runs away from home because her parents are too strict, Tar runs away because his father hits him. Different reasons, but the same end result. They become addicted to heroine and will do anything to get a high. Over the span of five years we are taken through their lives and meet the same people that they do, from addicts to the few that want to help them. He spends the last night with his girlfriend Gemma together in a car which takes her into serious troubles with her parents. From then on she is controlled all day long . Lily was a horrifying character, because of how extreme she was. She was the biggest addict of all the friends, and her insistence that she was a good mother even when she shot up between her breasts while breastfeeding highlighted this perfectly. Her boyfriend, and the father of her child, was also a sad, sad character, especially with what we found out he had done in the end to get more junk. Burgess again courted predictable controversy in 2003, with the publication of Doing It, which dealt with underage sex. America created a show based on the book, Life As We Know It. In his other books, such as Bloodtide and The Ghost Behind the Wall, Burgess has dealt with less realist and sometimes fan Melvin Burgess is a British author of children's fiction. His first book, The Cry of the Wolf, was published in 1990. He gained a certain amount of notoriety in 1996 with the publication of Junk, which was published in the shadow of the film of Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting, and dealt with the trendy and controversial idea of heroin-addicted teenagers. Junk soon became, at least in Britain, one of the best-known children's books of the decade.Reread 2023: I still state that this is one of the first YA novels, and it's influence opened up so many doors and helped shape the world of YA into what it is today. Richard invites Tar to go to Asia with him to get him out of that drugscene but Tar doesn't want to run away because he is quite satisfied with his life and the success he has as a dealer. Gemma thinks so too in the beginning, because she earns a lot of money in the parlour and she would like to tell her parents how well she does but she doesn't dare to. Although she phones them sometimes she can not go home until she is clean. This book was recommended to me by a heroin addict, a beloved person who has since tragically died from an overdose. I'm still immersed in grief and read this to look for more answers. As difficult an account as it was, it definitely unsparingly showed the reality of what it's like to be under the influence of such a devastating drug. I can't even imagine what it's like to live with such an addiction but this was the closest I came to glimpsing what so many people have fallen victim to. The horror of it is eye opening and harrowing. Heroin takes away one's dignity, identity, values and personality and replaces all of that with a person unrecognisable to themselves and those who love them. It creates a need so intense for the next fix that everything else is obliterated. Now, I’m not an impressionable teenage mind. I’ve never done drugs, never smoked, and I only drink alcohol once in a blue moon. I’m 24 years old.