Below is the complete list of Ellen Hopkins’ Tricks books in order. For this series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Tricks Books
About Tricks
Ellen Hopkins’s Tricks series is a two-book young-adult verse sequence about five teenagers whose searches for love, freedom, security, and acceptance lead them into sexual exploitation. Tricks follows Eden, Seth, Whitney, Ginger, and Cody as their initially separate lives move toward prostitution and trafficking, while Traffick continues with the same five characters as they confront what survival means after exploitation has already altered their relationships, identities, and expectations for the future. The books are connected directly and are best understood as one continuous examination of vulnerability and recovery.
The five narrators begin from sharply different circumstances. Eden is the daughter of a conservative preacher and lives in a household where sexuality and disobedience are treated through rigid religious judgment. Seth is a gay teenager from a farming family who longs for acceptance but finds his sexuality threatening the security of home. Whitney comes from greater material privilege yet feels emotionally diminished within her family and becomes vulnerable to manipulation through her need to be valued.
Ginger’s childhood has been marked by poverty, neglect, and abuse, leaving her searching for safety and affection outside her home. Cody faces grief and financial pressure while developing a gambling problem that pushes him toward increasingly desperate choices. Hopkins deliberately gives the teenagers different economic backgrounds, sexual identities, family structures, and routes into exploitation. Their stories undermine the idea that there is one simple profile of a teenager who becomes vulnerable to trafficking.
Tricks initially presents these lives in alternating sections that appear largely independent. Gradually, common patterns emerge. Affection becomes leverage, promises of security conceal control, and decisions that seem voluntary are narrowed by money, homelessness, addiction, rejection, or emotional dependence. Several characters believe they are choosing love or independence only to discover that another person has been shaping the available choices for personal gain.
The novel’s structure becomes increasingly interconnected as the characters are drawn toward Las Vegas. Their convergence gives physical form to what the alternating narratives have already demonstrated: radically different lives can arrive at the same place of exploitation through very different chains of vulnerability.
Traffick changes the central question. Escape from immediate danger does not restore the teenagers to who they were before. Eden, Seth, Whitney, Ginger, and Cody must contend with rehabilitation, addiction, family rejection, damaged trust, legal consequences, and the difficulty of imagining ordinary futures after experiences that have altered how they understand intimacy and themselves. Hopkins places greater emphasis on recovery and reintegration without presenting either as straightforward.
The sequel is particularly concerned with the difference between rescue and healing. Physical removal from exploitation may be essential, but it cannot erase trauma, restore damaged relationships, or guarantee that a survivor has somewhere safe to go. Some characters encounter people willing to help; others must reconsider families or relationships that contributed to their vulnerability in the first place. Progress occurs unevenly, with setbacks remaining part of the process.
Both novels use Hopkins’s characteristic free verse and multiple narrators. The compressed lines, changing page shapes, and rapid switches between voices allow five complicated stories to develop without merging their experiences into a single representative account.
Publication order is essential. Tricks shows how each teenager becomes trapped, while Traffick examines what follows when survival creates another difficult beginning. Together, the books form a deliberately uncomfortable but compassionate story about manipulation, exploitation, and young people attempting to reclaim choices that others learned to use against them.