Charlotte is best friends with Alexis who has a troubled home life with her parents being drunk and arguing while Charlotte doesn't feel like she fits the family where her brother was always in trouble and now in the army. While she relies on the painkillers she started taking to make her feel better. There's also her little sister who's best friend admires Charlotte and looks up to get while her sister feels left out...



All about the danger of painkiller addiction, feeling lonely and lost without family around as well as being written in poetry form, this is a raw depiction of how addiction can start out and grow controlling especially when spurred on by others like Charlotte's boyfriend in the book. It was a gripping quick read and raises great awareness for health both physical and mental and how they can effect you.



Many thanks to the publishers for allowing me to review this book for them!

Let me preface this review by letting you know that the e-ARC copy that I received of this book was in a PDF format that contained odd formatting. Some words had odd symbols or question marks instead of letters meaning I had to guess and stumble my way through some of it.

Little Pills a lyrically told tale of prescription pill abuse and addiction. We follow 17-year-old Charlotte through getting hooked on and addicted to Oxycodone, a highly addictive painkiller. The story is told in verse and because of this and the subject matter, I believe that fans of Ellen Hopkins' work may like this read. While I do love to read this kind of story and format, Little Pills disappointed me...a lot. My ebook was roughly 200 pages. 200 pages of verse is very short meaning this is a FAST read but not in a good way. It's too fast. It's too short. I feel like this story could have benefited from more depth and detail. There is no time to connect and care for Charlotte or her family and friends. When I finished it I was left feeling like this was a short introduction to a book but no? That was the book...all of it. Hello, Ms. Doods? Where is the rest of this book? I want the rest of the story? I want the in-between! I want the details?! Where were they? There is so much potential here but it falls incredibly flat.

I received my e-arc copy of Little Pills by Melody Dodds from the publisher through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. Little Pills is on sale April 2, 2019.

Heartbreaking but important poetry/story for young adults about addiction and the dangers of drugs. Very quick read

If I had known this book was written as poetry, I probably wouldn’t have been interested. However, I’m glad I didn’t know because I did enjoy reading it. I wish it were longer.

There wasn't anything necessarily wrong with Little Pills, it just left me feeling like something was missing. I didn't really enjoy the dramatic narrative towards the end (how it would suddenly change to all caps and overusage of punctuation — I understand the idea behind it, but it didn't make me feel a sense of urgency as much as stronger phrasing would have), and the ending reminded me too much of the ending of Crank by Ellen Hopkins, which made it feel a little ripoff-y. Maybe I'm being unfair and wouldn't have felt that way if I hadn't read Crank, but it's hard not to compare the two a little bit.

I'd like to thank NetGalley and the publishers for providing me with and arc in exchange for an honest review.

This is most definitely not a book for everyone.
It brings up some pretty touchy subjects, namely mental illness in the form of addiction. I appreciate how the author essentially wrote a cautionary tale of the impact addiction not only has on and individual, but on others around them, and how difficult it is to truly quit.
Discussing mental illness is very important and must be done in the right way, which I feel Dodds did very well.
Unfortunately, I'm not very into poetry and I there were many letters missing replaced with (? " ') etc. Not sure if that's because it was an arc or if that will also appear in the final copy.
I also felt like we weren't really able to get to know the characters very well since the book was so short, and consequently, I can't truly care for what happens to them after the book closes.

From the very first poem I knew I would love this story immensely.. It reminded me of Crank by Ellen Hopkins. This book was written in short free very poems all about a young woman who gets hooked on her grandmother's painkillers. I liked how this story shows the effect that the drugs take on not just the user but the family's as
well. I think that the poems helped take what could have been a very dark subject and made it a little bit more family friendly (if that's even possible). Very good book I liked the main character the most, probably because the whole story was about her and just mentions of others but it made the whole thing more interesting. I think it was like that because you could see what she was doing feeling etc so it gave you a better scoop on the story. This book is great for all ages even though its a teen read. Great read and I'm glad that I got the chance to check it out.

In a variety of different styles of prose, Little Pills tells a story of family, high school and addiction.

The book reads like an Ellen Hopkins book, with the styles of poetry and the text formatting changing from chapter to chapter. The subject matter is heavy, but told in a way that the target audience can relate to and, in my opinion, treated carefully enough that I would be comfortable recommending this to high-school aged readers. While the main character does romanticize the high of the drug, she also faces realistic consequences which are told using equally descriptive language.

What if your world was falling apart around you? What if you found a little pill (or 3 or 4) that could make you forget for a little while? This is a novel written in verse that tells Charlotte’s story of how something starts out feeling so good but can end up so badly. I think that the way this book is written I think it offers an opportunity for tweens and teens to access poetry that they can connect with, see its power as a way to tell a story, and also see drugs and their effect in a way that shows how insidious they can be. The end of the book has a strange feeling compared to the rest, but I think the very last poem shows the true power of addiction.

***Thanks to NetGalley for providing me a complimentary copy of LITTLE PILLS by Melody Dodds in exchange for my honest review.***

*The ePub ARC copy I received was difficult to read due to formatting of letters on top of each other, so I had to do a little deciphering, which interfered with my enjoyment but did not factor into my review,

LITTLE PILLS, a novel in verse, tells a story of the impact pill addiction in an easily relatable manner that will appeal to middle grade, younger YA readers and reluctant readers. Kids who haven’t yet read verse will have no problems understanding the straightforward storytelling of Melody Dodds.

I’d recommend LITTLE PILLS to most kids as an introduction to understanding substance abuse as well as verse.

An interesting take on the spiral of drug abuse and the effects on family and ourselves. Like the story told in verse as it broke it up and made it readable without being too dark...but also not losing any of the emotional pull it needed.