Hawkes Harbor
- Book Review,
by S. E. Hinton
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's Book World/washingtonpost.com
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.
From AudioFile
YA novelist S.E. Hinton's (THE OUTSIDERS) first adult novel brings with it sex, swearing, and pop philosophy. Jamie Summers, illegitimate, orphaned, brought up by cruel nuns, leaves the orphanage and goes to sea. Later, in a mental hospital where he is being treated for amnesia and depression, Jamie pieces together the events that led him there. Hinton's opening scenes show her remarkable insights into adolescent behavior, but the story soon deteriorates into an ordinary, sometimes silly, vampire tale. Narrator Dick Hill brings the sound of a tinny small-time crook to Jamie, and his pal Kell sounds as rough as sandpaper. Avoiding stereotypes, Hill gives an original voice to the bloodsucker, his dark, somber tones almost eliminating images of Bela Lugosi. Despite pirates, sharks, gunrunning, and buried treasure, this book doesn't float without Dick Hill's lively performance. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
From Booklist
In a self-reinvention comparable to Madonna's foray into picture books, the doyenne of gritty teen realism has written her first novel for grown-ups after a 20-year publishing hiatus. This one roves far from the street toughs, bikers, and cowboys of The Outsiders (1967) and Tex (1979). Mental patient Jamie Sommers is a former gem smuggler who goes catatonic when an escapade brings him face-to-face--or, more precisely, face-to-neck--with a vampire. Sprung from his locked coffin by the hapless Jamie, Granville Hawkes first snacks on his liberator's blood, then binds him into lifelong servitude. The story line veers from gothic melodrama to Munstersish family comedy when the cursed bloodsucker regains his mortality and settles into a perversely fatherly relationship with the now-addled Jamie. As startling as this story line may sound, Hinton manages to work in quite a few cliches (stakes through the heart, keening virgins, etc.), and sentimentality frequently wells up alongside the elements of parody. This is as peculiar as it is unsuccessful--but it will nonetheless attract a considerable readership, owing as much to Tor's promotion of it as "the publishing event of the year" as to its appeal to vampire-lit groupies and curiosity seekers alike. Jennifer Mattson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Ellen Kanner, Pages Magazine
"Hawkes Harbor is a ride so wild it all but lifts off the pages."
Review
"Hawkes Harbor is a ride so wild it all but lifts off the pages."
Book Description
An orphan and a bastard, Jamie Sommers grew up knowing he had no hope of heaven. Conceived in adultery and born in sin, Jamie was destined to repeat the sins of his parents -or so the nuns told him. And he proved them right. Taking to sea, Jamie sought out danger and adventure in exotic ports all over the world as a smuggler, gunrunner-and murderer. Tough enough to handle anything, he's survived foreign prisons, pirates, and a shark attack. But in a quiet seaside town in Delaware, Jamie discovered something that was enough to drive him insane-and change his life forever. For it was in Hawkes Harbor that Jamie came face to face with the ultimate evil....
About the Author
The legendary author of The Outsiders (1967), That Was Then This Is Now (1971), Rumble Fish (1975), Tex (1979), S.E. Hinton is acclaimed as one of the most provocative, best known and best selling young adult authors of all time. More than thirty years after its publication The Outsiders continues to appear on such bestseller lists as USA Today. And in PW's recently published "All-Time Bestelling Children's Books" (paperbacks) selling over 10,000,000 copies since its first publication, The Outsiders takes the number two position flanked by E.B. White's Charlotte's Web in first position and Judy Blume's Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing in third. Hinton's gritty and powerful novels have also inspired four major motion pictures. She lives in her home town of Tulsa, Oklahoma.
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