By Catherine Greenman
Delacorte Press, $16.99, 276 pages
“How great and weird would it be if we stayed together forever?” thinks seventeen-year-old Thea when she meets Will at Stuyvesant High School in Catherine Greenman’s new novel, Hooked. Throughout Thea’s junior year and Will’s senior year at their prestigious high school in New York, the two are inseparable. Even when Will goes off to college at Columbia, they stick together.
Thea’s parents are divorced. Her father is an aloof workaholic, which is better than the alcoholic she remembers from her childhood. Needless to say, their relationship is strained: “Dad was forever dreaming up ways in which I could be improved. That was the secret to our relationship. It’s what kept him interested”. Things aren’t much better with her mother, who owns a nightclub, evades her taxes, and sleeps with married men in their apartment. It seems all Thea has in the world is Will, but when Thea misses a period, and then another, their happily-ever-after begins to unravel.
Hooked is a story of love, loss, and growing up, but most of all, it is a story about one girl who is determined to make her own way and break free of society’s expectations for her life.
Emily Davis
[amazon asin=0385740085, B004CFAWCA&text=Buy On Amazon&template=carousel]