---
product_id: 219512
title: "Tricks"
brand: "ellen hopkins"
price: "223308Ar"
currency: MGA
in_stock: true
reviews_count: 13
url: https://madagascar.desertcart.com/products/219512-tricks
store_origin: MG
region: Madagascar
---

# Tricks

**Brand:** ellen hopkins
**Price:** 223308Ar
**Availability:** ✅ In Stock

## Quick Answers

- **What is this?** Tricks by ellen hopkins
- **How much does it cost?** 223308Ar with free shipping
- **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship
- **Where can I buy it?** [madagascar.desertcart.com](https://madagascar.desertcart.com/products/219512-tricks)

## Best For

- ellen hopkins enthusiasts

## Why This Product

- Trusted ellen hopkins brand quality
- Free international shipping included
- Worldwide delivery with tracking
- 15-day hassle-free returns

## Description

Five troubled teenagers fall into prostitution as they search for freedom, safety, community, family, and love in this #1 New York Times bestselling novel in verse from Ellen Hopkins.
When all choice is taken from you, life becomes a game of survival. Five teenagers from different parts of the country. Three girls. Two guys. Four straight. One gay. Some rich. Some poor. Some from great families. Some with no one at all. All living their lives as best they can, but all searching…for freedom, safety, community, family, love. What they don’t expect, though, is all that can happen when those powerful little words “I love you” are said for all the wrong reasons. Five moving stories remain separate at first, then interweave to tell a larger, powerful story—a story about making choices, taking leaps of faith, falling down, and growing up. A story about kids figuring out what sex and love are all about, at all costs, while asking themselves, “Can I ever feel okay about myself?”

## Technical Specifications

| Specification | Value |
|---------------|-------|
| Book 1 Of 2 | Tricks Series |
| Dimensions | 5 x 2.2 x 7 inches |
| Edition | 1st |
| Grade Level | 9 - 12 |
| Isbn 10 | 1416950079 |
| Isbn 13 | 978-1416950073 |
| Item Weight | 1.2 pounds |
| Language | English |
| Print Length | 640 pages |
| Publication Date | August 25, 2009 |
| Publisher | Margaret K. McElderry Books |
| Reading Age | 14 years and up |

## Images

![Tricks - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51-DxNXKqgL.jpg)

## Available Options

This product comes in different **Format** options.

## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ another amazing book
*by  on Reviewed in the United States April 10, 2011*

Just like her other books, Tricks has real meaning to it. It's the kind that makes you reflect on your life and see how much you take for granted. It makes you hate yourself for the times that you yelled at your parents for not letting you go to a party, or not buying you clothes that "you'd die without". I really respect her and thank her for exposing these true and important topics.Tricks takes turns switching from five different perspectives: Eden Streit, Seth Parnell, Whitney Lang, Ginger Cordell, and Cody Bennett. I fell in love with every single one of these characters. They all had a different, heartbreaking story to tell and reduced me to nothing less than a pile of tears. Ellen Hopkins didn't sugar-coat anything in this book and threw in disturbing, yet necessary scenes that portrayed the seriousness of this topic. The book showed how you can jump from one path to another in the blink of an eye and end up living a life you never though could happen to you. You'll read Tricks and think, that will never happen to me, but no one can be 100% positive.It was strong, powerful, and really spoke to me. The only part that bothered me was the ending. It was sort of just left to your imagination, which I guess is ok because it's not like she could have ended it with 'and everyone lived happily ever after.' This book was very moving and I recommend it it anyone who can handle the truth.Eden Streit is the daughter of a preacher and has to be a good little Christian and follow all of her parents' orders. Eden makes the mistake of falling in love with Andrew, who her parents don't approve of, and everything goes down hill from there.Even though Eden is the opposite of me, I can relate to her and got really into her story. She felt so real to me and it felt like she was telling me her story as if she were in the room.Seth Parnell is still mourning the loss of his mother and struggling with the two parts of himslef-the straight guy around his dad, and the gay guy who has fallin in love. Even though Seth is a guy, I suffered through every painful moment he told. He was a very likeable character who really caught my attention.Whitney Lang is a pretty normal girl in the shadow of her perfect sister, with a mother who doesn't like her and a father who is only home on the weekends. Whitney was the easiest for me to relate to since she had a more normal life than the others. I instantly connected to her and it was really sad to read her drastic fall into prostitution.Ginger Cordell is my favorite character I think. She lives with her grandmother and her numerous siblings(most from different fathers). Her mom is a prostitute and is rarley around. I don't know why, but Ginger stuck out the most to me. She seemed so strong and brave to me and I cried so much while reading her story.Cody Bennett is an average guy who likes to drink and smoke(he actually reminds me of my brother minus the prostitution and smoking part). When his step-father gets fataly sick, Cody has to step up to the plate and make money the fastest way he can to support the family. Cody is a really great character and I love him for bing so selfless. Ok, being a prostitute isn't a healthy way to save your family, but he did what he had to do to help his mom.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Heartbreaking and Brilliant!
*by  on Reviewed in the United States August 13, 2018*

You can read this book for FREE online at Riveted until 9/9/18! 😊That’s what I did! Naturally I loved it so much that I bought the ebook as soon as I finished reading (as well as the sequel!) and quickly re-highlighted all of my favourite first read passages before agonising about what I could write about this book without wandering into spoiler territory.Trigger warnings include sexual assault, gambling, abandonment, alcohol and drug use, murder, homophobia, seriously dodgy parenting, religion used as a weapon and probably a whole range of heartache I’ve already repressed.‘Can you tell mehow you ended up in “the business”?More mostly truth. “I never wanted to.I just didn’t know any other way to survive.”’Ellen Hopkins. Whenever I begin one of her novels I know I’m setting my heart up to be broken. It always feels as though my heart is being folded into some distorted origami design each time one of her characters is hurt or betrayed. Then the inevitable happens; one fold too many breaks me.‘When you sell your body, youalso sell what’s inside. Pieceby piece, you sell your soul.’Why do I put myself through this? Because it’s worth it! I don’t think there’s an Ellen book I’ve read where I haven’t come away changed by the experience. They’re just so real and I love that about them.Ellen opens my eyes in a way that I don’t think any other author ever has, and she does it over and over again. She takes issues I know about from personal experience, validates my feelings, shows me other perspectives and introduces me to characters who are willing to discuss what people I know don’t/won’t. She also takes issues I only know anything about from reading news stories, blogs or textbooks and gives me insights and understanding I may never have gained any other way.‘When all choice is taken fromyou, life becomes a game of survival.’Ellen breaks my heart but she also enlarges it. I come away with empathy I didn’t know I still had. I come away with the confidence that regardless of how dire your situation may look and feel there is hope.‘What is wrong withme? Why aren’t I worth loving?’Ellen opens my mind, allowing me access to people I don’t know in my life outside books. She takes topics that people discuss in terms of statistics and humanises them. Her characters stay with me when I finish reading and in the case of this book I wanted to adopt all of the kids I encountered.I found myself with a preconceived stereotypical notion that all of the characters would eventually meet one another on the streets in Vegas. I was wrong. As I began to read about the five main characters I couldn’t help wondering how their lives were going to intersect. I became attached to the five as well as others like Ginger’s Gram and younger sister Mary Ann, and Andrew, who made me want to believe in true love.Although I read the blurb prior to reading that told me otherwise I still assumed that most of the kids who feature in this book would come from extremely abusive families; probably because everyone I know personally who has been homeless has been for that reason. Again I was wrong.‘You might be surprised atwhat you can do, shouldcircumstances dictate.’I loved the book’s title even more after reading it. Tricks. I originally associated it solely with prostitution yet while I was reading I also began to associate it with the deception employed by the adults in the book.I need to know what happens to these kids so I’m diving straight into the sequel.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ and even love. However
*by  on Reviewed in the United States April 19, 2016*

Tricks by Ellen Hopkins is a multiple perspective prose novel targeting hard topics such as teenage prostitution, drug use, and the negative consequences of trusting in the wrong person. Five teenagers rise as the protagonists, all from different parts of the country and different situations. Some explore their sexuality, while some are straight, and some gay. The socioeconomic ladder is also represented, with some of the teenagers being from affluent families and some being the all too common family that has to move back in with the again grandparents to be able to survive. The protagonists are Ginger, Cody, Seth, Eden, and Whitney and all of their stories share in common the age old search for freedom, trust, identity, and even love. However, this novel is not a happy go lucky fairy tale but rather the opposite. The tense and dark story lines highlight just what can happen when people are manipulated with false pretenses, whether they be false pretenses of love, trust, or even faith. This novel is about how far down a person can be thrown, and about the glimmers of hope that arise as the protagonists drag themselves back up into the sunlight.Though I appreciated the unique way the story was told, especially as it allowed the novel to become more accessible to teenage readers due to the quick reading time, the prose structure at the novel unfortunately felt forced for the majority of the novel, with only some pages throughout that really benefitted from the ability to say two things at once, such as on the intro to point of view changes, where the left out words to the right combine into a sentence that enhances the section’s reading. The prose at times can be beautifully crafted, but more often than not the prose merely works as functional, and not as moving.The actual narrative structure of the novel could also have been a bit better, as the many points of view and the quickly switching narratives at times left me, the reader, more than a bit confused. In the beginning, because of the shortness of each character’s section and the five points of view, I found it very difficult to differentiate between the characters, and I also found it very difficult to identity with the characters and to see them as well rounded. However, after the first one hundred pages or so, the novel took a turn for the better and picked up steam just as all the protagonists were really starting to unravel. The last one hundred or so pages of the novel were amazing. They were gritty, dark, and real in a way that seemed to make the narratives leap from the page and come to life in front of you, and the ending of the Tricks was all that you could potentially want in a novel with a theme as dark and real as teenage prostitution, as it left you feeling as unsure about your emotions and the life paths of the characters as those very own characters may have been feeling. The ending places you in a sense of loss and anguish, and shows you how different people can end up with different endings to their lives, even if they all fell or were dragged down to the same dark place.My qualms with the style of the novel aside, I very much enjoyed reading this text as I felt it did an excellent job as portraying a multitude of characters to offer some options of whom a reader could identity with. Though the choices may seem a bit archetypal at times (i.e. the gay farm boy or the rich girl who does not think her mother loves her) I believe it is more important to care about the diversity given in the text, which then can lead to excellent discussions on trust, sex, sexuality, family, love, etc. I also really enjoyed the fact that Hopkins wrote this book about an increasingly prevalent social issue in the modern day, and that she did so without sugar coating it, because the teens that this is happening to do not have their reality sugar coated, either. The dark subject matter is at times written with the gritty callousness of a journalist, especially when it comes to the sordid details of what the protagonists are going through, from being forced to take drugs and make porn, to having to become a stripper or a prostitute for money to help family, or to help you get away from family. All in all, I peg this novel as very important the read, as far as social issues go, and educating the younger generations about what is happening in the world, to people their age, that just might be living next door.I would recommend an age of 14+ for this novel due to the graphic and violent scenes depicted, as well as scenes of sexual nature, child abuse, rape, drug use, and all around the seedier aspects of life.

---

## Why Shop on Desertcart?

- 🛒 **Trusted by 1.3+ Million Shoppers** — Serving international shoppers since 2016
- 🌍 **Shop Globally** — Access 737+ million products across 21 categories
- 💰 **No Hidden Fees** — All customs, duties, and taxes included in the price
- 🔄 **15-Day Free Returns** — Hassle-free returns (30 days for PRO members)
- 🔒 **Secure Payments** — Trusted payment options with buyer protection
- ⭐ **TrustPilot Rated 4.5/5** — Based on 8,000+ happy customer reviews

**Shop now:** [https://madagascar.desertcart.com/products/219512-tricks](https://madagascar.desertcart.com/products/219512-tricks)

---

*Product available on Desertcart Madagascar*
*Store origin: MG*
*Last updated: 2026-10-28*