Tilt

by Ellen Hopkins

Love-good and bad-forces three teens' worlds to tilt in a riveting standalone novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author Ellen Hopkins.

Three teens, three stories-all interconnected through their parents' family relationships. As the adults pull away, caught up in their own dilemmas, the worlds of the teens begin to tilt.

Mikayla, almost eighteen, is over-the-top in love with Dylan, who loves her back jealously. But what happens to that love when Mikayla gets pregnant the summer before their senior year and decides to keep the baby?

Shane turns sixteen that same summer and falls hard in love with his first boyfriend, Alex, who happens to be HIV positive. Shane has lived for four years with his little sister's impending death. Can he accept Alex's love, knowing his life, too, will be shortened?

Harley is fourteen-a good girl searching for new experiences, especially love from an older boy. She never expects to hurdle toward self-destructive extremes in order to define who she is and who she wants to be.

Love, in all its forms, has crucial consequences in this wrenching story from Ellen Hopkins.

• ISBN10: 1416983309
• ISBN13: 9781416983309
• Publish Date: 11 September 2012
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Simon & Schuster
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 608
• Language: English

Reviews

[Angie]

I didn't realize that Tilt was a companion novel to Triangles until I was already a few "chapters" in and thought "Hey, this seems familiar!" That just made me more excited to keep reading since I wanted to know the other side to the story. But soon I grew a bit bored, because the first half is essentially the same, but from the perspective of the teenagers, so I felt like I had read it all before. Thankfully, Tilt goes beyond the timeline of Triangles, which is the part that I really wanted to know about.

I'll start with the one thing that kept me from rating Tilt higher: it felt really long. In general, verse novels feel really short despite their heft. However, since I already knew the set up of all the families, I just wanted that first half to get on with it! Sure, it was from a different perspective, but the family dynamics and problems are still the same. Also a lot of conversations, I'm pretty sure were verbatim. Some were summaries though, so that helped, but in general it dragged for me until around the midpoint when the teens' problems really came front and center.

Tilt focuses on Mikayla, Shane, and Harley. Mikayla is Holly's oldest daughter who winds up pregnant right before her senior year of high school. And just like her mom's story, I was most invested in Mikayla's tale despite not being able to relate at all, or even caring about pregnancy in general. I liked that the author went a different route than other teen pregnancy stories that I've read. Mikayla's pregnancy winds up being directly connected to Shane's as he deals with the death of his sister and feeling ignored by his mother who desperately wants another baby. Shane also worries about death in general, since his boyfriend has HIV. Then there's Harley, whose story took me longer to get into because she's just sooo young and naive. But once things start happening with her, I realized I could relate more than I thought.

I really liked Tilt, at least in the second half. It was nice to revisit these characters and see what life held for them. I also really liked the inclusion of poems from the side characters. Before the POV shifted there would be something from another character who appeared in the previous scenes, such as Shane's boyfriend and sister, Mikayla's boyfriend and friends, and Harley's stepbrother and best friend. Those were nice touches that showed that there's even more sides to the story.

Read more of my reviews at Pinkindle Reads & Reviews.