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Hawkes Harbor
by S. E. Hinton
S. E. Hinton returns with a tale of vampires and redemption.
Jamie Sommers cowers and becomes agitated as darkness descends. Jamie is crazy and residing in an asylum where he tells Dr. Phillip McDevitt, director of Terrace View Asylum, tales that mix fact and fantasy -— or do they?
S. E. Hinton, author of The Outsiders, Tex, and Rumblefish to name a few well known stories that have made it successfully to film, is best known for her young adult books. Hawkes Harbor is her first new novel in fifteen years and is her first adult novel.
As with all Hinton’s books, she has created an interesting and complex cast of characters beginning with Jamie Sommers, Kellen “Kell” Quinn, and Grenville Hawkes and a fascinating backdrop of wild tales few would believe. As Dr. McDevitt learns that, as implausible as Jamie’s stories seem, there is no dishonesty in him outside of his gun running, smuggling, murder, and various cons. There are holes in Jamie’s stories, but the holes point to a shadowy truth that is stranger than anything in Dr. McDevitt’s experience.
Despite the intrigue inherent in Hinton’s Hawkes Harbor, there is a familiarity to the story that is easy to trace. Anyone who was caught up in the tale of Barnabas Collins and the Collins family of Collinsport, Massachusetts will easily recognize the source in the long running and very popular Dark Shadows, which ran during the 60s and continues to run on the SciFi channel on cable. Jamie Sommers is Willie Loomis who came to Collinsport with his fast talking and oh-so-debonair, Irish friend, Jason McGuire, to blackmail Elizabeth Collins and ends up trying to save Maggie Evans from Barnabas’s evil plot to recreate Josette Collins, Barnabas’s lost love. What Hinton does so well is give Jamie/Willie Loomis has an engrossing and fascinating history to explain how he ended up in Terrace View Asylum recovering from near fatal gunshot wounds, accused of kidnapping a woman he obviously loved (a woman he says he rescued), and terrified of the gathering darkness as night falls.
One thing is certain, Hinton has lost none of her storytelling power and Hawkes Harbor is well worth the time. One hopes that S. E. Hinton will delight us again very soon with her insight into the maze of the human soul.
Title: Hawkes Harbor
Author: S. E. Hinton
Publisher: Tor Books
ISBN: 0765305631
Review written by: J. M. Cornwell
Reviewer's Rating:8.5
Reader's Rating: 0
Reader's Votes: 0
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