"Candy" by Kevin Brooks

YAYY. I finished the book!! This book was great. It kept me on my toes the whole time. I just kept reading just to know what happened next. I mean, there are some parts where you can tell what’s going to happen, but even then, you want to know how it all turns out. I don’t know how to describe it, but I like the book. Now umm….I guess I should start to explain the book. I’ll try not to put any spoilers in or anything.

Basically, there are about 6 characters in the book: Joe Back, Candy (Candice), Iggy (Ignatius), Gina Beck, Mike, and Joes’s dad. Joe Beck is a regular 16-year old kid from London, who loves music, and is even in a band called “The Katies.” When going to see his doctor one day, he met this girl named Candy, who grabbed his attention as soon as he saw her. She was beautiful, and he became infatuated with her after a few moments in her presence, but she soon left him by himself at the train station. About a couple minutes., he saw her at McDonald’s so they ate together. While they eat, this big guy comes over, and starts yelling at Candy about money. He scares Joe away, and Joe is scared for Candy. When emptying out his pockets, he finds a paper that Candy slipped into his pocket with her cell phone number on it. He calls her back later, and they spend the day at the London Zoo. He kind of figures out that she is a prostitute, and that bug guy (Iggy) was her pimp. He also becomes aware with the fact that she is addicted to heroin. Then some stuff happens (I’m not saying what, because that would ruin the book), but this is where the real tension comes in, and Candy tries to stop using heroin. There are some funny parts in the book, where she goes crazy just to get some heroin (because she's going through withdrawal symptoms, so it's not really her fault) like when she knees Joe in the groins, just so she can go back to Iggy, even though he'd probably beat her to dealth, just to get some heroin.

In my opinion, Candy is not the most “well-rounded character,” because she doesn’t really change throughout the book, but Joe does. Joe is changed by his encounters with Candy. The other couple in the book, Mike and Gina, seems much more developed than Joe’s and Candy's, but I guess the author did that on purpose because Mike and Gina are getting married, and have known each other far longer than Joe and Candy have known each other.

But yeahh, the book was great, and so was the ending (to a certain extent). There is only is when I finished reading the book, I was literally begging for more, because the ending was just...I don’t know, maybe a bit abrupt. I wish Kevin Brooks elaborates a bit more as to what happened to the main characters, because I am really interested to know.