Customer Reviews

Wrecked

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One day, Anna goes to a party with her best friend Ellen; there, they drink alcohol and visit the other guests. On her way home, Anna gets into a car accident, seriously injuring Ellen and Cameron Polk, her brother's girlfriend and the most beautiful and popular girl in school. Sadly, Cameron dies from her injuries. Anna blames herself for what has happened and begins having nightmares.

While celebrating Thanksgiving with her aunt and uncle, Anna's family hears about a peculiar form of therapy called EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing). Shortly thereafter, Anna begins seeing a psychologist and learns that she's been suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Once the EMDR therapy gets underway, Anna begins seeing the real problems in her life --- her relationship with her brother, her low self-esteem, and the fact that her family is living in fear because of her very controlling and abusive father.

WRECKED paints a beautiful and haunting picture by providing readers with a deep understanding of a teenager's mind. Today, thousands of people suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Hopefully they will be able to get help like Anna did and learn how to live a normal life again.

--- Reviewed by Ashley Hartlaub

I read the book in a day; it's a short and easy read. If you can get over the writing flaws and repetitiveness of it the story is a very interesting and thought-provoking glimpse into the mind of a teen girl who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.

I do wish the main character, Anne, would have been developed further because I did not find her particularly likable. Her only quality mentioned in the book is how superficial she is. To be completely honest, at times I felt the book dragging on because of its repetitive nature. Additionally, the writing is not great by any stretch of the imagination. The author uses phrases such as "I go" instead of "I said" which I assume is supposed to make you connect better with Anne, but it really distanced and distracted me.

Sixteen-year-old Anna was driving her (drunk) best friend home from a party when she collided head-on with her brother's girlfriend's car. Now a beautiful high school senior is dead, Anna nearly lost an eye and suffers from PTSD with crippling nightmares, her best friend Ellen is in a wheelchair, and the family is at odds with one another. Wrecked opens with the car accident and its aftermath, but, as a whole, the book is an exploration of the fabric of an entire family.

Anna's friends and family have widely disparate reactions to the wreck. What is the right way to respond, anyway? Anna can find websites about how to deal with a dying family member, how to be a friend to someone who is grieving, and how to cope if you have suicidal thoughts, but there is no website to address the peculiar situation of how to cope with unintentionally killing one of your peers.

The narration of Wrecked is told in a genuine teenaged voice, full of questions, full of frustration with parents, and desperately seeking direction. In a strange way, the entire crisis brings Anna's family closer, to a more complete understanding of one another.

This book is highly recommended for teens and family members of all ages. It is especially important for anyone dealing with a family crisis or the accidental death of a family friend. Fans of this book should seek out Mary Beth Miller's Aimee and John Green's Looking for Alaska.

The Book Wrecked by E.R. Frank, and published by Atheneum/Richard Jackson Books September 27, 2005. There are 256 pages in this book. This book is fiction. This book is about a young girl who accidentally kills her brother's girlfriend in a car accident. She deals with the ups and downs of having the girl's death on her shoulders, which is very hard for her to cope with.
This book is mainly about dealing with life and death. I think that the author is trying to allow young adults to take a look through a teens eyes and let them see how it would be if they drink and drive. The young girl's name is Anna she goes to a party with her best friend Ellen. When they arrive at the party peer pressure pushes Anna do what she normally does not do, that is drink. She stops after a while and sobers up a little bit but Ellen is definitely wasted. On the way home is what changed Anna's life forever. All she can remember is the accident, and waking up in the hospital. She keeps repeating things she heard like screaming, and Ellen's voice. Now Cameron her brother's girlfriend is dead and no one is blaming her but she feels that it is all her fault. From what I have read so far in the book I believe that it is a very good book. It makes me feel kind of like I am in the story. It is so descriptive that I feel like if I close my eyes I can see what is going on.
After reading the part of the book I have completed the book has really left a lasting impression it has made me think about what I would do if I were put in that situation. It kind of makes me sad, I want everyone that is interested in reading this book to know that it is the type of story that once you have picked it up to start to read it you can not put it down.

I loved this book. The voice of the narrator Anna, is sincere, and although she has endured living with a troubled father and survived a terrible car crash, her voice is never whiny or filled with self-pity.
Even though everyone tells Anna that the crash was not her fault, years of emotional abuse from her father and guilt over her brother's grief over the loss of his girlfriend in the crash takes its toll on her and she begins to have severe panic attacks and is unable to face driving a car. The author of Wrecked is a psychotherapist and the sessions between Anna and her shrink are realistically portrayed.
I also enjoyed the scenes between Anna and her friends at school and away in Florida. Anna's friendship with her friend Ellen is put to the test when Ellen continues to abuse alcohol. There are no easy answers which is what makes this such an excellent read for young adults and adults alike. It shows that there are no bad guys, just people like us who have a hard time navigating through life. A satisfying ending brought the book full circle. I'd read other books by this author.

Anna Lawson's father is pissed off at her, she doesn't talk much with her mother, her brother looks down on her, her best friend Ellen thinks she's too scared to do anything wrong. Hers is a normal, average 16-year-old life. And then it isn't. In an instant, nothing will ever be normal again.

Anna and Ellen have been at a party. Ellen's had too much to drink, so Anna is driving her home. Suddenly, everything is chaos.
In the hospital, Anna learns that she has been in a head-on collision. She's bruised and battered, one eye has been cut, but otherwise, she's okay. Ellen is much more seriously injured, with a collapsed lung and broken bones. Worst of all, the driver of the other car - her brother's girlfriend Cameron - is dead.

Everyone tells Anna that the accident wasn't her fault, that she isn't to blame for Cameron's death. But Anna knows she killed Cameron, just the same. Her overbearing father doesn't want Anna to have therapy, so she tries hard to cope with the guilt and sorrow, the nightmares and the panic attacks. Soon, however, Anna learns that she needs help to deal with what's happened to her, and to come to terms with her family and herself.

Speaking of tension, E.R. Frank's Wrecked is one of the most moving stories you could find on the aftermath of an auto accident. An auto crash involving three teens kills one, leaves a passenger disabled, and is viewed from the driver's perspective in Wrecked. For Anna has killed her brother's girlfriend in the accident and has to handle not only the death but the rift with her brother and her passenger friend, who was drunk at the time. An emotionally charged story of responsibility.

I was sitting in the mall yesterday, waiting for the Sears auto repair guys to install a new battery in the '89 Camry wagon that our almost-sixteen-year-old will soon be driving. Parked on a comfortable bench, I cracked open what seems to be a pretty fun YA "guy read" that I could possibly be writing about in the near future. I'd just begun the second section of the book, at which point the main character is rhapsodizing about morning and brewing coffee for the caffeine addicts. Then the father is knocking on a door, trying to awaken the main character's big brother. In that moment of reading, during which the father is beginning to raise his voice, I felt myself starting to noticeably tense in anticipation that the dad was going to fully detonate. Here it comes again, I thought.

That's when I realized that I was actually still dealing with memories of a DIFFERENT dad, the dad from E.R. Frank's new book, WRECKED, and that I needed to process how I had been so affected by the painful story of Anna Lawson, her older brother Jack, Anna's friend Ellen, and Jack's girlfriend Cameron Polk.

" 'Jack,' I said. 'I'm not trying to be mean or anything.' I took a sip of ginger ale. He waited. 'But...why do you think Cameron went out with you in the first place?'
"He sighed and looked out the newly opened window. I knew what he was seeing: a telephone wire, that big maple tree, and the streetlight. He started humming.
" 'What?' I wasn't trying to be rude. I was really wondering about it.
"Jack stopped humming. 'Nothing.' He shrugged. 'But you are really superficial.'
"I felt my face get hot. 'What's that supposed to mean?'
" 'Listen,' he said. 'You just implied that there's something about me that is lesser than Cameron.' I opened my mouth to argue, but he kept talking. 'That's what I mean. You think about things that aren't important. Like who's got more status than the other person.' I started feeling nauseous again. 'And you make your decisions about that based on things like clothes and friends and where people sit in the lunchroom and who people hang out with. And if people aren't just like you, you think they're not worthy and that nobody else who matters to you thinks they're worthy. And so you write those people off.' I thought I might throw up. 'I remember when you weren't like that. I remember when you cared about things that mattered and when you weren't always sizing everything and everyone up all the time. And I liked you a lot then.' He stayed where he was, leaning against my dresser, butt on the floor, knees up.

"He wasn't giving me that disgusted look. He didn't have that disgusted tone of voice. He was really talking to me. Trying to tell me something."

Anna's life is about to change. Attending an unsupervised party with friends, Anna downs some booze and then spends some time trying to sober up before she suddenly realizes she's missed her volatile father's curfew. Driving herself and Ellen home, the world turns upside down in an instant, complete with Bono singing the chorus of "Sunday, Bloody Sunday" on the disembodied car radio, and a screaming from outside the car that suddenly ends. The driver of the other car in the head-on collision, we learn, is Cameron Polk.

Anna's long psychological recovery from the fatal accident provides the setting for an unsettling examination of a family that was already riding on the edge of disaster prior to the crash. And when we repeatedly probe the family history, frequently instigated as a result of one of Anna's bloodcurdling nightmares, we find that the past offers a lot more gray than it does black or white.

The fact that there also ends up being some gray areas in terms of the accident makes this aspect of the Lawson family story that much stronger a vehicle for contemplation, discussion, and debate, especially among adolescents who have just, or are about to, get their driver's licenses.

How much of your mind is on your driving? A study being publicized the other day concludes that (in the words of Newsday) "Driving and yakking on a cell phone increase fourfold your chances of ending the trip in an emergency room." It can certainly be asked both of newbie and veteran drivers: "What levels of concentration, attention, and sobriety does it take to ensure that you are being a responsible driver, a defensive driver, a guilt-free driver? How is your driving being affected by alcohol, cell phones, headphones, mochas, Big Macs, flirting, fighting, or whatever the hell is going on while you're piloting that mass of metal at high velocity?

"And my brother's bedroom door slams, and I'm left on the other side, small and alone and not knowing what to do, and Frances is handing me her tissue box, and I feel it like waves, just waves of despair washing over me, and I cry and cry and cry, and my bones are soggy, and then I see Jack's head flat on the table, next to his laptop, and broken glass strewn across the living-room floor, and broken glass and flashlights glittering underneath the dangling earth, and the earth turns into soil, and then a blade of grass grows up out of the soil, and it's joined by other blades, and then there are brown leaves and fingers picking them up one by one, Jack's fingers picking up the leaves, and then his face looking at me, his face saying, If you had just stayed home and picked up the leaves, maybe none of it would have happened..."

I'd hope that many adolescents (and even more so, their parents) recognize that if Anna's dad had been someone she could trust and count on then she could have either called him for a ride or gotten permission to sit tight and not get on the road in the first place. That dad is one piece of work, but YA author and Manhattan psychotherapist E.R. Frank does a superb job of showing us many facets of this man with serious problems.

That she can call us anytime without fear of repercussion is certainly the message Shari and I will again share with our own soon-to-be driver, along with a recommendation that she check out this latest piece of powerful writing by E.R. Frank about a family in crisis.

And turn off your cell phone, damn it!!!

This book cannot be put down. I read this book in 5 hours, I am in [...]honors so this book was easy for me, I absolutely adored this book. I love how it went into flashbacks of times with her and Jack. Excellent book, purchase!