55 pages • 1 hour read
Colleen HooverHopeless
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2013A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Power of Hope
When Holder says, “I love you, Hope,” it is a small moment in a novel so filled with drama. But it is the emotional tipping point in Sky’s difficult journey to reclaiming her identity. A buzzed Holder, collapsing on Sky’s bed, drifts off to sleep, his arms and legs entangled with Sky’s. Inadvertently, his guard down momentarily by the hard lemonade, Holder reveals his suspicions that the new girl in school is, in fact, the girl he and his twin sister played with years earlier as neighbors in Austin. The sentiment drives the thematic argument of the novel.
The novel, which begins as a familiar young adulty romcom, quickly morphs into a harrowing investigation into the short- and long-term impact of sexual abuse on defenseless, vulnerable, and trusting children. In the face of the struggle to process years of abuse, Sky, even years later and long out of the reach of her predatory father, still struggles with the trauma. She cannot understand why, atypical of teenagers, she is unaffected by the powerful persuasion of sexual activity. She cannot feel what she assumes would be a healthy reaction to kissing.
Given the novel’s use of two names for the primary character, the novel is literally and thematically about reclaiming hope. In following Sky’s courageous reclamation of her identity and Holder’s determined efforts to make peace with himself, the novel suggests the need for hope. Battered, violated, and used, Sky refuses to give in to the darkest inclinations. In the love she shares with Holder, Sky taps into the energy of hope. The last object Sky finds in the box of her mother’s keepsakes that Karen gives her in the closing chapter is the locket with the inscription “My ray of Hope.” As Sky puts on the necklace, sealed with a tender kiss from Holder, the novel argues that circumstances, however dark and horrific, cannot destroy the human spirit. It is an inspiration for those who face difficult circumstances and who, in turn, rise to the challenge, affirming the indominable human spirit and the will to survive and triumph.
The Impact of Sexual Abuse
For all its celebration of the soul-deep emotional connection between Sky and Holder, the novel’s interludes reveal the unsettling reality of a child being sexually abused by her father. Even as Sky delights in the emotional connection she feels with Holder, she begins to recover memories of her treatment by her father. In this, the novel focuses on both the short- and long-term impact of such heinous actions on the child, innocent of any wrongdoing but locked into a prison of anxieties and terror, and helpless to do anything but endure.
That psychological torment is keyed to the sound of the doorknob in Hope’s bedroom being turned, indicating her father is returning. Short-term, the novel argues, Hope has little recourse but to endure, which she does by disciplining her mind to count the plastic stars all over her bedroom walls until her father is finished. With nowhere to turn, she suffers quietly, crying at length until Holder and Les, her only friends, cannot help but notice. Given that her father was an authority figure and a police chief, and given his gentle manner even as he violates his own daughter, the girl is emotionally paralyzed. She is determined only to survive, without recognizing the courage such endurance requires from a child—as Holder will tell her in a moment of tenderness years later in the hotel after the father is dead.
The long-term impact is measured by Sky’s complex reaction to Holder’s efforts to express their love physically. A scene in Chapter 28 reveals the trauma of sexual abuse in its survivors. What begins as a typical teenage discovery of the power of physical love quickly morphs into a scene of terror. Sky recoils from the touch of the one she knows she loves. Her mind tells her this is right, even as her body convulses in fear. She breaks out into a panicked sweat, her body begins to tremble, and her heart palpitates in panic: “I just want him off me” (237), she thinks. None of this, the reader understands, makes any sense to her, as she still has not unpacked her memories.
The emotional trauma of her abuse leaves Sky, years after, apart from others. She is unwilling and unable to connect with anyone on a physical level and is ultimately at odds with her own body. Only after she confronts her memories does Sky begin the long and difficult road to recovery. Concerned over the impact of Sky’s story, Hoover includes in her postscript to the novel information about sexual abuse helplines.
The Corrosive Effects of Secrets
The novel’s plot is sustained by an intricate network of secrets. Holder knows when he first sees Sky at the convenience store that she is the neighbor girl who was kidnapped years earlier. Sky herself must come to learn that her apparently eccentric, technophobic adoptive mother, Karen, is actually her kidnapper—and later still, Sky learns Karen is her rescuer. She must come to terms with questions about her sexual identity that are tied to her being a survivor of rape by her father. For as long as she can remember, Sky saw her father as a fragile, tragic figure, unable to manage the daughter he loved in the aftermath of his wife’s death in a car accident. As such, Sky believes her father abandoned his daughter to foster care in the hopes that she would be raised by far more emotionally stable people.
Meanwhile, Holder allows Sky to believe he is exactly what the vicious schoolhouse rumors make him out to be: a violent jerk who beat up a gay student in a reprehensible hate crime. For his part, Holder has never forgiven himself for not being more in tune with his twin sister; he blames himself for her overdose, which was, he finds out in the showdown with Sky’s father, connected to being sexually abused by the police officer who lived next door. And Karen finally reveals to her adopted daughter that she is in fact her niece, and that the entire adoption story has been a self-sustaining, self-justifying lie.
Everyone in this story lies. In many ways, then, the novel is about how truth breaks through. The story also depicts the toxic effects of secrets kept too long—even secrets designed to spare emotions and to protect vulnerable others. If Sky appears emotionally healthy after being lied to for so long and after keeping her memories locked away, the novel argues she is fooling herself; genuine emotional and psychological health can only begin when she confronts what she denies, finally embracing the truth. Secrets have left her paranoid, emotionally fragile, and struggling against a civil war she wages against herself.
Until the day she wears the bracelet, Sky appears to be part of a typical, even conventional teen romance, as the new girl in school comes under the spell of the school’s bad boy. The bracelet begins the slow evolution into the truth and the end of the toxic pretense of secrets. One after another, Sky and Holder come to learn the truth of their childhood. And only then can Sky, who embraces her real name in the closing chapter, begin to heal. Love does not heal Sky—that is the hokey fairy-tale frothiness of romcoms. Truth alone heals Sky and brings about Hope.
The Dynamics of First Love
It is a pop culture cliché, celebrated in catchy songs and heart-warming films: the tectonic power of first love. Even as Sky begins to understand she cannot give her first physical experience of love to Holder, and even as she begins to perceive herself as damaged, she taps into the power of a heart stirred for the first time. Amid such complicated emotions, Sky compares the experience to a maelstrom. The young, innocent, and untested heart finds its way through the confusion and chaos to a striking certainty: This emotional upheaval is something of a miracle.
The novel, however, is not interested in asserting that Sky Holder simply fall into the certainties of first love, acting as if first love is a given. Rather, over three months, Sky and Holder step hesitatingly closer to the moment when each knows their mutual attraction is true love—soul deep, a fusion of heart and soul and body.
In this, the novel anatomizes first love, presenting it not as a miraculous intrusion of sudden emotions but rather as a steady momentum, a series of interrelated and terrifying steps that edge Sky into the safe and reassuring arms of Dean Holder. Much as the novel articulates with immediacy the young couple’s physical interactions, the novel details how the two make their way through a logic no one really understands, to the point where Sky believes “he makes me feel necessary. Like my existence alone is necessary for his survival” (353).
Thus, the novel moves from Sky’s initial, hormone-driven physical reaction to first seeing the slightly-older, tattooed bad-boy, to the very adult moment after Sky’s father dies by suicide. Eventually, Sky understands the power of love to console, to encourage, to give joy, and to bless with hope.
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By Colleen Hoover
