Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #78756 in Books
• Published on: 2005-10-04
• Released on: 2005-09-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 304 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Erasing age and genre barriers, prize-winning, bestselling YA author Hinton turns out a dark, funny, scary, suspenseful tale that will entertain mainstream and adventure/horror readers alike. Jamie Sommers is orphaned at the age of eight in 1950 and sent to live with some nasty nuns until graduating as a troubled young man to a life at sea. After surviving a number of life-threatening adventures in exotic ports, he ends up in the small town of Hawkes Harbor on the Delaware coast, where he stumbles into a situation so dire his entire life is changed in a manner of minutes. His new employer, the mysterious Grenville Hawke, lord of Hawkes Hall, known to Jamie as It, the Thing and the Vampire, almost kills Jamie, then goes on to enslave him for years to come. Moving back and forth through time, Hinton twists and shapes her bleak material until the story and the reader's expectations have been turned upside down. This is an adult novel, meaning that Hinton gets to write sex scenes and use the word fuck when she wants to, but the basic elements that made her 30-year-old book TheOutsiders a long-time bestseller are present in this rousing read. This is a contemporary Treasure Island with a genre-bending twist.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Is there an American teenager who hasn't read at least one of S.E. Hinton's books? Ponyboy, Rusty-James, Motorcycle Boy, Tex -- for a lot of us, these names are as evocative of adolescent despair and yearning as Holden Caulfield's. With the 1967 publication of her first novel, The Outsiders (written when she was only 16), Hinton pretty much invented YA (Young Adult) literature as both genre and marketing category. Her best and best-known works -- The Outsiders; That Was Then, This Is Now; Rumble Fish; and Tex -- are all straightforward first-person narratives charting the unstable, if now all-too-familiar, terrain of Teenage Angst Lit: boy trouble, girl trouble, drug trouble, parent truancy, warring high school cliques, abandonment, betrayal, loss, all played out against a working-class background of decaying American heartland towns and farms. They're gritty stories, leavened with a grain of hope and a stoic moralism that have earned them a coveted spot on many middle and high school reading lists, even as the microscopic view of teenage mores has also sometimes gotten them banned from same.

Hinton's career has been in something of a hiatus since 1979, when her last YA novel, Taming the Star Runner, appeared. Since then she's written two books for younger children. Her new book, Hawkes Harbor, her first major novel in more than 20 years, is being trumpeted (and marketed) as her first "adult" novel.

I'm one of those people who grew up with Hinton's books, and I wish I could say that Hawkes Harbor is a triumphant return by a much-beloved writer, but frankly, it's a shambles. The author's cast-iron reputation is probably safe from being damaged by its publication -- I hope, so, anyway -- but it's hard to imagine any first-time readers, adult or otherwise, being captivated by this rambling, episodic mess.

Jamie Sommers, the novel's protagonist, is in many ways a typical Hinton character brought to rather shaky maturity: feckless and lacking direction, essentially goodhearted but easily led astray. Jamie is an orphan, raised by cruel nuns in the Bronx; he attends high school, then has a three-year stint in the Navy. A life on the ocean waves appeals to young Jamie, and after his service he takes up with Kellen Quinn, a silver-tongued Irish gunrunner, smuggler and general ne'er-do-well who is by far the novel's best-drawn character. Kell and Jamie's long-term, intense and intensely competitive relationship has homoerotic tensionstamped on it in shining gold letters; but Hinton, alas, is too timid to pursue it.

Or perhaps she's simply unaware. There's an odd, naive time-capsule quality to Hawkes Harbor; most of the action takes place between the early 1960s and 1978, and the story reads as though it were cobbled together from B-movies made during that period. There are pirates, an insane asylum, a shark attack, soft-core sex with a mean rich girl on a yacht, soft-core sex with two nubile young women on a cruise ship, a haunted house, a ghost and, god help me, a vampire. All of this is recounted in earnest, unintentionally hilarious prose that sprays clichés the way an assault rifle sprays bullets. If Hawkes Harbor were a movie, it would be giddily dissected by the "Mystery Science Theater 3000" crew, and might well become a camp classic, a la "The Catalina Caper" or "Santa Claus Versus the Martians."

Unfortunately, Hawkes Harbor is a book. The first third is likable enough, with Jamie and Kell having adventures on the high seas -- pirates, jewel smuggling, narrow escapes, sharks. But even these engagingly old-fashioned escapades lack narrative drive, since Hinton inexplicably breaks the novel's momentum with an endless and confusing series of flashbacks and flash-forwards, all framed by a series of interviews Jamie undergoes at the Terrace View Asylum, where he is being treated for depression and amnesia.

The vampire angle is tossed into the novel nearly halfway through, though it's hinted at earlier. Again, Hinton seems sadly out of touch. However one feels about the Children of the Night and their eldritch kin, the last 30 years have seen an efflorescence -- or is that effungusence? -- of vampire literature from the likes of Stephen King, Anne Rice, Brian Lumley, Suzy McKee Charnas, Laurel Hamilton and Lucius Shepard, among dozens of others.

Hinton seems not to have read any of these. Her vampire, Grenville Hawkes, is the least convincing member of the undead since Ed Woods's chiropractor put on poor dead Bela Lugosi's cape in "Plan 9 From Outer Space." Once Grenville is mistakenly disinterred by Jamie, who's looking for treasure in an old graveyard, he and the plot lurch from one wildly unconvincing scene to the next, all strung together with as much logic or coherence as, well, an Ed Wood movie. In the book's most bizarre twist, old Kell Quinn reappears out of nowhere. Grenville sucks Kell's blood, Jamie drives a stake through Kell's heart; not long afterward, Grenville appears somehow to have been cured of vampirism and, in his new gruff-but-lovable avuncular role, takes Jamie on a cruise ship, where the young man meets those two cuties mentioned earlier and has the kind of "Penthouse Letters" experience that young men do not have in The Outsiders.

It's sad, and depressing, to read a bad book by a writer one respects.

On her Web site, Hinton states that "I have to become my narrator when I'm writing." One can only assume that in order to write an "adult" novel, she felt it necessary to abandon her great strength -- the first-person voice inside her head that gave us some of the most influential YA books ever written. A novel about the grownup Ponyboy or Tex could have been brilliant; so could a book featuring an entirely new cast of kids adrift in a new century. Sadly, that's not the novel Hinton has written in Hawkes Harbor.

Reviewed by Elizabeth Hand
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Remember what made The Outsiders, Tex, and Rumble Fish classics? Hinton’s first adult novel (appropriate for teens, too) contains some of those same elements, but critics aren’t quite sure what to make of it. Hinton knows how to tell a story, and this one’s entertaining, ghoulish, and full of fantastical adventures. But the non-chronological time frame and confusing narration left some reviewers bewildered. A few unexplained elements, from Jamie’s fading voice and changes in Hawkes’s personality, also left them hanging. But, if you’re curious to know what Hinton’s been up to the past 25 years and don’t expect a classic, Hawkes Harbor is worth a go.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Customer Reviews

It's Dark Shadows
I loved Hinton's books when I was a kid so I gamely tried her adult offering. While I agree with the previous reader that the book very often felt like a ya novel I still found lots of points of interest.

But that's neither here nor there. This book is a pastiche inspired by the vampire soap opera Dark Shadows and for fans of that show I recommend this book. Imagine the early Barnabas Collins episodes retold from Willie Loomis' point of view and you've got "Hawke's Harbor" in a nutshell.

Most of the original cast are represented. Willie is now Jamie, Barnabas is Grenville, Jason McGuire is Kel, Maggie is Katie, Julia is Louisa. Hinton combines Joe Haskell with Sherrif Paterson and takes some liberties here and there but the characters and early storylines are all here.

Most interestingly she presents the Collins (Hawkes) family as moneyed snobs who look down on the little people of Collinwood (Hawke's Harbor)and have nothing to do with them.

If you are a Dark Shadows fan you will have fun picking out the references. It's great how she takes this campy 60's soap and infuses it with real terror and sorrow and even- dare I say it? Poetry.

Not for all tastes to be sure- but it's a fast read and quite fun.

If you're not a Dark Shadows fan, beware - this may not be your cup of tea!
I read Hinton's classic YA novels when I was young, and enjoyed their grittiness. This novel, however, is quite different, because it was originally meant to be a Dark Shadows-tie in novel. That's why some of the characters aren't as fully drawn out as if they had been created for a fully original story - just as if you read a Star Trek or other media tie-in novel, where you already "know" James T. Kirk or Spock. Only in this case, the novel was not published under the Dark Shadows imprint, but characters were renamed as if they were original, with Barnabas Collins, the famous Maine-born vampire, becoming "Grenville". If you enjoy Dark Shadows, and are familiar with the storyline that made the 1960s soap a runaway success and continuing cult favorite, you'll "get" this novel and may enjoy its new, more adult take on the original story. (There's more explicit sex than in the soap, which was very popular with teens.) If you've never seen the show, but are a S.E. Hinton fan, you might want to rent Dark Shadows' first DVD collection in order to understand the storyline better. If you find that Dark Shadows' campy, theatrical feel doesn't appeal to you, you probably won't like this book either.

If you love S.E Hinton, don't read this book
When I was in high school, I loved The Outsiders, and I loved S.E. Hinton's characters (I was a little in love with many of them too). I read everything else she wrote: Rumble Fish; That Was Then, This Is Now; Tex. I read some of them several times. I saw the movies. And so, this fall, when I walked by a display with Hawkes Harbor, I did a doubletake, then went over to read the back cover, and lingered awhile before moving on with a longing backward glance. My husband then bought it for me as a gift.

I read Hawkes Harbor yesterday--it's a quick read. When I was halfway through my husband asked how it was and I said it was awful and he gave me one of those knowing looks and said, "How long has it been since you've read her?" Meaning, maybe you've got it wrong, maybe you're misremembering how good The Outsiders was, it's been 20 years, hasn't it? "No," I said. "She was really good. I was in high school then, and there were books I loved then that were awful, but I knew they were awful and loved them anyway. The Outsiders was something special."

So we went online, and pulled up the first few pages here on Amazon. And the voice is just as strong as I remember it, and the prose is just as clear. On the second page, there's the sentence, "When I see a movie with someone it's kind of uncomfortable, like having someone read your book over your shoulder," a great sentence that puts you right inside her narrator's skin. I don't think there's a single sentence that good in all of Hawkes Harbor.

Hawkes Harbor is a mess. Hinton hasn't figured out how to write in third person, and her point of view is all over the place in a way that's both jarring and distancing. She has no real feel for these characters, and characters who seem to be important turn out to be minor. The timeline isn't clear, the story is jumbled and feels cobbled together, everything from the language to the plot is cliched, and the sex is gratuitous and ... silly, actually. Not one character is developed into someone who feels as real as Ponyboy feels in the first three pages of The Outsiders. I read the whole thing, in part because I kept expecting it to get better--this was S.E. Hinton, after all--and in part because I was fascinated by how awful it was.

If you loved S.E. Hinton's novels, and the sight of Hawkes Harbor brings up a nostalgic longing for the worlds she created so beautifully, go back and re-read her early novels. Or rent the movies that were made of them. But don't read this. Keep your impression of S.E. Hinton as a writer untainted by this garbled mess that should never have been published, and hope that she finds that old voice that enthralled for the next one.