Hawkes Harbor (Unabridged) [Audio Download]

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.

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.

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.