Guardian Unlimited Books | Review | Don't go into the cave
Mark Lawson reviews Hawkes Harbor, S. E. Hinton's first novel for 17 years:
Apart from two short picture books for kindergarten children, Hawkes Harbor is the writer's first publication for 17 years, and she's now keen to broaden her appeal. This is billed as her first adult fiction, and a note on her website even warns adolescents against it. Not discovering this stipulation until after finishing the book, I was surprised by it. Hawkes Harbor has many classic elements of teenage fiction: the hero, Jamie Sommers, is an orphan who goes to sea and has adventures with pirates and a shark. While he also has sex with a number of young men, the encounters are described no more graphically than in the adolescent fiction of Judy Blume, and there's soon a crucial scene in which Jamie finds himself cold and frightened in a cave where he makes a terrifying discovery. The scouts' honour of book reviewers demands that Jamie's find in the cave should not be given away but, for this reader, it was of a nature that pushes the book even closer to the children's fiction shelves. It's enough to say that what comes out of the cave admits the novel to a certain gothic genre which, although it has attracted grown-up authors, is most credible in juvenile writing.
Highly recommended review...
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