Customer Reviews

Hawkes Harbor

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(29)

 

 

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.

For those of you reading or wanting to read S.E. Hinton's latest book, you should know a large part of what she wrote was not of her own creation. She has, however, given no indication that she got her idea from somewhere else. The reason I wish to expose this is because she is passing this story off as her own. What most do not know is that Hawkes Harbor was originally a book she wrote for publication with Harper Collins. It was to be the next Dark Shadows novel, a story about character Willie Loomis, including other characters, locations and basic storylines from the old soap opera. Harper Collins turned it down, and she changed the location, and the character and place names, and submitted it elsewhere. It is still the same story, the same characters and takes place in a New England town, with nearly all the same events. Hawkes Harbor is a fanzine, disguised by new names, parading around as mainstream fiction.

I don't fault her for being a Willie Loomis fan and wanting to write about him, but if she is going to pass it off as something else, she should have changed far more than names and a few facts. Does not doing so make it plagiarism? On Dark Shadows, Willie is a sea tramp, is partner with an Irishman, becomes a vampire's slave, gets shot and ends up in a mental institution, and the vampire has a woman doctor (who falls in love with him) trying to cure him of the curse. Basic facts taken straight from Dark Shadows. If she wanted to lift the character, she should have come up with something other than those facts I just mentioned to make up her premise.

Why is Dan Curtis Productions (owners of Dark Shadows (DS) copyrights, I presume), allowing this? Perhaps there was a stipulation that she not mention DS in any connection with Hawkes Harbor. Well, I have made no such agreement, and I want it known that this so-called "character only S.E. Hinton could create" as one review stated, was not her character at all.

Collins? Roger? Out of the blue, these names from DS come up-we've never seen them in the book before (or ever see them again). Collins should have been Hawkes, and Roger should have been Richard in order for the information to make sense. But somehow they got missed when she was changing the names to hide that she got the story from Dark Shadows. (Wonder how come she didn't use a word processor Find and Replace function?)

Hawkes Harbor itself suffers from structure problems and inaccuracies. The action jumps around so much, it's often not clear in the first half if the flashbacks Jamie is having are what he is telling his doctor in the sanitarium or if it is just for the reader's benefit. There is a whole small section where she tells what becomes of one character.

Jamie releases the vampire in March of 1965, yet in February of 1965 he tells people he's got a new job, (he's going to work for the vampire). Interesting twist of time there. How'd he know? Or maybe in her version of time, February comes after March. (Couldn't she have checked to make sure her dates were correct? There were other times in the book where the dates jumped ahead, then back a few days, much to the confusion of the reader.)

She has one character telling another that Jamie suffers from the "Stockholm syndrome." She says this in 1968. The label "Stockholm Syndrome" did not come into use until 1973 when bank robbers held hostages at a bank in Stockholm, Sweden. The hostages came to identify with their captors, and doctors trying to explain why this would happen, coined the term Stockholm Syndrome to describe the phenomenon. The phenomenon had already been noticed, but there was no label for it until 1973.

Now, on the DS Willie Loomis List, an online discussion group, it has been proposed that Willie suffered from the Stockholm Syndrome. This proposal came about in spring of 2000 on this list. I submit that Ms. Hinton has lurked on this list, agreed with that diagnosis, and so put it into her story. Nothing wrong with that, except she did not check her facts. Very sloppy. If she had come to this conclusion about Willie on her own, without anyone suggesting it, it seems likely that she would have paid more attention to her research, and thus, noted the date the term was coined. She would then have had to either take that out of Hawkes Harbor.

But that is not even all of it. In addition to taking a large chunk of her story from DS, it seems she has lifted ideas and images from other DS fan fiction. Her use of the term "the Thing" to describe the vampire was straight from a fanzine called My Boy Willie by Christina E. Pilz, published in summer of 2000. And there was an incident in Hawkes Harbor that looked to be lifted from a Virginia Waldron story, which was published in KarlenZine (KZ) II in 1987. (After his release from the sanitarium, Jamie is accosted and pelted with rocks by kids in town. This same thing happened to Willie in "Overshadowed.") This could certainly be chalked up to parallel development, as are some similarities to stories in KZ III & IV. (KarlenZines are the large fanzines whose main focus is the DS character Willie Loomis as played by John Karlen. KZ III was published in August 2001 and IV in August 2003, long before Hinton's book saw print.)

She does, however, handle the main character with sensitivity, though the ending was a big disappointment.

I cannot claim absolutely that Ms. Hinton committed plagiarism, but it is a known fact that she submitted her book as a Dark Shadows novel once before. It is still the same story. She certainly owns the background scenes she created, but the rest of it? I guess that's up to those parties who feel their work has been taken.

Let me say this about S. E. Hinton and Hawkes Harbor. I want to be kind. I want to be fair. I want to give the author the benefit of the doubt.

So:
It fell flat on its face.

The first scene in the psych hospital is the only one in the book that's "alive." The rest is dead info-dump, and the plot and characters straight out of a certain cult soap opera of the 1960s.

Some of the story is lifted straight out of Dark Shadows, dialogue included. A "relative from England," buying an old dump of a house? Jamie/Willie Loomis, explaining: "His car broke down on the road---he hired me when I fixed it." I would list all the other coincidences but they'd contain too many spoilers. Add to that Hinton's choppy, disjointed prose and plot, and you get a misfire of a book.

Then there is the anachronism of Stockholm Syndrome, not known until years after the book's timeline. And the inevitable PC nonsense, straight out of the guilt-ridden 90s, like the relentless comments about "homeless people." They were called bums back then.

There's a story in here, maybe. But characterization and events are just skimmed over in favor of gratuitous sex scenes and vile language. Jamie's doctor is simply a plot device to unreel his backstory. The novel doesn't "play." And the cruise and its aftermath are so astoundingly inappropriate that you have to laugh out loud. Not to mention the maudlin, needless ending.

Conclusion? Hawkes Harbor is clearly a Dark Shadows novel. Not only is it plagarism in the first degree, it's also actionable. Someone really ought to have taken out that troublesome reference to Roger Collins.

"Objection, your honor! Plagarism, pure and simple!"

(Bangs gavel) "Objection sustained." -- "Fan" abas

Sloppily written tale of an orphan who grows up to befriend pirates,shrinks and vampires is annoyingly structured with virtually no plot.It had potential but it feels like a bunch of ideas lazily tossed together.The blending of different elements from pirates to vampires drew me to buy this book but pardon the ovious pun...this semi-vampire buddy novel really Sucks.

I asked for this book for Christmas because I was a fan of Hinton's as a child and I am sadly disappointed! I finished the book only because I kept thinking it would have to get better. I would love to ask Hinton what she was thinking, to wait so long to deliver such a weak story. The main character is totally not believeable, first he is a tough guy, a troubled orphan, then he becomes someone who is "sobbing" all the time because of what happens to him which is again, totally unbelieveable. vampires? please. Toward the end, the story begins to flow more smoothly but are we really expected to believe that the vampire has become a good guy and now everyone is friends? I am sorry to have wasted my time on this book.

I read this book as part of a reading group of which I am a member. Base on the preson who picked this book, I was looking forward to an enjoyable read. However, this was a very very disappointing book. Simply put the story line is silly and a waste of time. It appears to be the author's goal to have the story broken into three parts but there is no flow and very little connection between the parts of the story. For example, the last 30 pages do not connect with the rest of the story at all and looks like an ending that one sees when the author does not know how to end a book. Also, there graps in the story line. Such as, what does the Vampire do to address the curse? It seems to get better but how? The bottomline is that if you want a story on a Vampire, go rent a video of Dark Shadows.

I got this at a library book sale and read it in two nights. What an incredibly compelling book and wonderful find. I LOVED IT. I'm pretty sure I fell in love with Jamie Sommers and maybe even Grenville a little bit. Their journey to friendship was a beautiful thing to read. I'll be keeping this as one of my special books instead of passing it on as I normally would.

Simplistic, predictable, slow, and anything but horrifying. The plot starts out promising, but it's soon lost amid seemingly unimportant details that are never satisfactorily tied together. There is no mystery within these pages. The characters never really come to life. They are poorly developed stereotypes in a town that is hardly described and fails to capture the 'every town' element that might have at least kept things interesting.

Jamie's breakdown foreshadows some sinister revelation that never comes. His chant of 'don't let it be dark' hints at trauma that is never described in enough detail for the reader to feel the horror, the breakdown, and the unending fear that Jamie's life embodies.

The ending is a huge disappointment. I read to the end hoping there would be something that would save it, yet nothing did. The author is capable of creating worlds that are so vivid and real, it makes you wonder why she bothered to write something halfway. Detail, description, and some insight into the characters would have gone a long way to fixing this.