Clean

3.5 stars.

“Clean” is about a story of a group of teens in rehab, with all sorts of different backgrounds in how they even got there in the first place. The newest kid is Olivia and out of all the kids she meets, she is the only one with a food problem from dieting too much.

Throughout the story, you get to have shifting perspectives from all five main characters. There is Kelly, the girl that would get drunk and snort coke. Eva who would get high off of pot and prescription pain killers. Jason who was always getting drunk to the point of blacking out. Christopher was a church going boy, that was homed schooled and started using coke, then meth from his neighbor. And then Olivia, upper class society girl who abused weight loss pills to the point of being anorexic. Then there is the therapist for group called Shirley. She sees through their bull and pushes them to be honest with themselves. The story spans over a period of three and half weeks.

My one favorite part was the kids learning about themselves and seeing on Family Day the dynamics of some of the kids with their parents; especially Jason's father who is an ex Marine and treats his mother like dirt.

But my most favorite part of all was the questionnaire history. Amy Reed broke down that into sections in the book, so that you wouldn't get it all in one sitting. It helped because as each question was answered by all five teens, you saw the progression in back story line up with the recovery of each one. You really got a taste of what it felt to be in their shoes, how they even ended up in the position they got them to rehabbed at 16 or 17.

I would recommend this book to any teen wanting to know what it was like to have gone too far in the world of abusing drugs and alcohol; to get an understanding of how hard it can be. But this is a good book I think for anyone who wants to go into drugs and alcohol consoling, because it can help them maybe understand what kind of problems they may come up against. But overall it's a great book to read.

My last thought for this review is that I wasn't sure what to expect out of this book. I knew there was going to be a theme of drug and alcohol use from teenagers, but to the extend that I was reading. it was very touching at some points and a lot of the characters were made more human by the end of the story.