Review: Hopeless – Colleen Hoover

Sky finally gets to start school for her last year of high-school after being homeschooled by her adoptive mom, Karen, her whole life. Karen has a strict no-technology policy at home, so Sky is a little left behind on that front. After Sky meets Dean, and they fall for each other, she is finally starting to feel something when she kisses a boy. This has some undesired effects as well, as Sky starts having dreams, never being sure whether those dreams are early childhood memories or nightmares. She starts to feel just as hopeless as Dean's tattoo, and as her past closes in on her, she needs Dean more than she has needed anyone in her life before.
Dean is mysterious, passionate and a little volatile when it comes to showing his feelings. He seems to be either very happy or extremely angry. Both Sky and Dean have a reputation to live with, and the gossips in school don't really care what is true and what is not, as long as they can talk behind other people's backs

Hopeless is as far from hopeless as it could possibly be! Rather courageous, strong, stubborn, beautiful and full of hope!

Sky has been home schooled her whole life, but for her senior year in high school, she has managed to persuade her mother to let her go to the local school so she can get ready to go to college later. Just as Sky is getting ready to go to an actual school for the first time, her best friend and next-door-neighbor Six is leaving for a year abroad. Because Six is very friendly with boys, she has quite a reputation in school, and that reputation has kind of trickled down to Sky as well, just because she’s been hanging out with guys as well and of course, since she and Six are best friends.

Hopeless really isn’t about high school drama, though, it is about Sky, and Dean. How they both have to deal with gossip and nasty reputations, and how they fall in love and Sky is finally feeling something when she is with a boy, and about how they both need to deal with the past. At the same time as Sky starts feeling something, she is having dreams as well. About a past she cannot remember. She knows she is adopted, and that she was in the foster system until she was four years old, but she never had any actual memories of what happened before she became Karen’s adopted daughter.

Sky has not had the same kind of life that Six has had – not only because she was home schooled, but also because Karen has a very strict no-electronics thing going on at home. They have no TV, computers or cell-phones, and while I can appreciate that some people want to be able to be off-line when at home, it did seem a little strange as well. When Six leaves for Europe, her goodbye present for Sky is a cell-phone, that she keeps hidden from Karen.

The relationship between Karen and Sky is a very good one, for once, there is a parent who is really present for her teenager, even if she also trusts Sky and lets her make a lot of her own decisions. Apart from her strange and disturbing dreams, Sky seems to be well-adjusted. The writing is extremely well done, it flows easily, the prose is beautiful, and the characters are all fleshed out! Even minor characters are described and showed in a way that made me feel like they were real, and that is a huge plus in my opinion.

Dean is a very complex character, and since the readers get to know him through Sky, her judgment of him color our own. I was a little wary of him in the beginning, even with all the warning signs telling me not to listen to gossip, I made the very same mistake that Sky made – I believed the things I learned about him from second or third hand

At the same time, Dean is also quite volatile in the beginning, we never know if he is going to be nice or nasty, happy or angry. As things move quickly between Sky and Dean, it is still easy to understand how she gets so caught up in him, because there is a depth to him that is really amazing. Sky and Dean seem to really get each other, they are both outsiders in high school, and they both have to fight against the gossipers who have nothing better to do with their free time than to make stuff up about people they don’t really know.

As the story moves forward, the mystery of Sky’s past becomes more and more present, until her memories almost explode. The aftermath of her remembering everything, and then realizing that someone else knew some of it as well was heartbreaking to read about. What she had to relive made me cry, and in some instances I had goose-bumps seeing how she was sorting through her memories to find some kind of peace within herself. She showed an immense strength, and she only got stronger as she worked through her past.

To make sure I don’t spoil anything, I will stop here – but I urge you: Get this book and read it! You need a quiet place so you can just read without stopping, and the time to do so as well. You also need a lot of tissues, but know that there are a lot of both happy and romantic moments as well – all is not sad – as I said in the beginning, there truly is hope throughout the whole narrative, and that might be part of what made Hopeless so beautiful to me.

Everything Six eats is only eaten to compliment her main course of Nutella. Tonight, she’s having a cheese and Nutella sandwich. I don’t know if I could ever acquire a taste for that.

I’m really hoping he’s being genuine because I can already tell he isn’t the kind of guy a girl gets a simple crush on. He’s the kind of guy you fall hard for, and the thought of that terrifies me.

“So you get the house to yourself and you spend Friday night baking? Typical teenager,” he says mockingly. “What can I say?” I shrug. “I’m a rebel.”

Passionate. He’s passionate about life, about love, about his words, about Les. And I’ll be damned if I wasn’t just added to his list. The intensity he conveys isn’t unnerving… it’s beautiful.

About Linda @ (un)Conventional Bookworms

Linda is an English as foreign language teacher and has a Master's degree in English Language and Literature. She's an avid reader, blogger, compulsive one-clicker and a genre omnivore. Ever since she learnt how to read she has been seen with a book or two in her hands everywhere she goes.

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