Disclaimer: This is a review, and as such will contain opinions, spoilers and (often) general shit talking. (If you talk about what you don’t like about a work, you learn a lot. When you think through a work with the stakes presented to you by the creator, by the context of the work, you learn a lot. I review things, not because I love to dislike things, but because dislike contains rich and vital information for the process of experiencing something, but I cannot access it without interrogating it.) So, if you don’t want to have this thing spoiled for you, or don’t know how to behave when a person on the internet, that you don’t know, has opinions that don’t line up with yours, this review is not for you. It’s also not for the author/creator of the work. Please and thank you.
Hooked promised me a dark Peter Pan retelling, but delivered what I can only be described as if someone fed a romance c.ai nothing but problematic Wattpad stories and daddy issues with a side of Overly Tragic Backstory™. While I approached this book with cautious optimism (my luck with finding retellings I’ve enjoyed has been… well, less than satisfactory), but the execution managed to limbo under even my lowest expectations.
James (Hook) is the MMC and Wendy (the FMC) is Peter’s son and Peter is Hook’s worst enemy. Seems like it has a pretty good shot at showing me a good time, but no.
Right out of the gate Wendy is the wettest of wet blanket FMCs.
She literally has the personality of soggy cardboard and twice the backbone — so much so that when her own friends question why James would be interested in her, I was nodding along because I was hoping she’d just excuse herself from the story and let someone more interesting take over.
Add to this that we already know James is only using her to exact revenge on Peter, the friends Wendy enters the club with telling her to not worry and just go with this creepy guy she essentially just met under the guise of “he’s hot, what could go wrong?” and don’t even ask her to text later that she’s safe and fine… yeah.
For Wendy, character development apparently means making her so virginal and submissive that she practically comes with a “handle with care” sticker, so she picks up on none of the red flags, she’s just totally starry-eyed around James from the beginning.
Wendy being so submissive and infantilised does not make her sympathetic in the least. What it does is makes her inner monologue read like a teenage girl rather than an adult woman.
The relationship dynamics are about as healthy as a gas station sushi platter.
What masquerades as romance reads like a PSA on red flags, complete with Stockholm syndrome that develops faster than a UTI from being fingered by a guy who doesn’t wash his hands after going to the bathroom, and a dynamic that reads more like a groomer and his victim than a romance.
But he’s (supposed to be) charmingly British, driving an Aston Martin and having a “tea kettle” in the house. (Yeah, I cringed at that. It’s an American author writing for an American audience and it SHOWS.)
Wendy also likes to engage in some poverty cosplay, because by her own admission she doesn’t need to work, but gets a job as a (useless) barista for the vibes. At a place called The Vanilla Bean, no less, because subtlety is dead and we need to be hammered on the head with her virginity.
And I was so ready for a pitch black MMC.
But instead of a deliciously twisted MMC what I got was Mister “Don’t get my cashmere suit dirty with your 2 dollar stains”. Yeah. I’m not even joking, he actually says that.
His backstory reads like someone playing trauma bingo: sole survivor of a plane crash that killed his family with a side of childhood abuse for extra seasoning.
And my hopes of him actually having some kind of hook for a hand were dashed as soon as James entered stage left, brandishing his hooked blade and the occasional uncomfortable and weird intrusive thought about what he’d really like to do (but which he never acts on).
I’m so tired of “dark” MMCs that the authors work so hard to make redeemable all you end up with is a wildly inconsistent, and not at all dark character that feels nothing but shallow and uninteresting. Because when you cut them off at the legs everything feels so inconsequential and pointless.
Such as when Wendy asks, “What are you to me?” and James replies, “Your worst nightmare” but he just cuddles her until morning after that.
And don’t even get me started on the breath play.
Those scenes are particularly cringe-worthy, demonstrating about as much understanding of safe kink practices as a abstinence-only sex ed class. Pro tip for authors: if you’re going to include kink elements, maybe spend fifteen minutes on Google learning how they actually work instead of just yolo-ing your way through things with potential real-world consequences.
What makes Hooked particularly rage-inducing is that dark retellings can be brilliant when authors actually bother to examine what they’re putting on the page. Instead, Hooked read like “problematic but make it sexy” was the only note in the creative process.
It’s less deliberate exploration of complicated themes and more like watching someone’s unexamined daddy issues play out in real time as a groomer finally gets their way with their victim, all the while insisting it’s romance.
The book culminates in the kind of saccharine domestic bliss that feels completely disconnected from the psychological complexity that the dark elements should have introduced. Naming children after dead people and slapping a happy ending onto a fundamentally unhealthy relationship dynamic doesn’t resolve the underlying issues the narrative has raised.
What makes Hooked particularly frustrating is that it’s such a missed opportunity.
Look, I’m not asking for every book to be a feminist manifesto wrapped in a romance novel. And dark retellings can be incredibly powerful tools for examining complicated themes, but they do require you to be willing to interrogate your own biases and examine the implications of the romantic fantasy.
Let me also say this: books don’t owe anyone any kind of morality. So, if an author wants to write a romance that reads like a handbook for groomers, they can.
However, again and again my thoughts came back to Lolita while I was reading Hooked, and only because Hooked lacked the kind of self-awareness and criticism of grooming, paedophilia, and sexual abuse Lolita uses as a disturbing but effective narrative technique.
Lolita is written from Humbert Humbert’s perspective, and he’s an unreliable narrator who tries to seduce the reader just as he seduced his victim. Nabokov deliberately made Humbert articulate and charismatic to show how predators manipulate and justify their actions. The beautiful prose is part of the horror — it demonstrates how abusers can make their crimes sound romantic or justified.
Literary critics generally agree that Nabokov intended to expose and condemn the exploitation of children, not romanticise it. The novel shows the devastating psychological impact on Dolores (the real girl behind Humbert’s fantasy Lolita), and by the end, we see her as a damaged young woman whose childhood was stolen.
However, the book’s reception has been complicated. Some readers miss Nabokov’s critical intent and get swept up in Humbert’s manipulative narration, which is exactly what makes the novel so effective as a study of how predators operate — but also why it’s been misinterpreted by some as a tragic love story rather than a condemnation of abuse.
The difference is that Nabokov deliberately crafted a critique of predatory behaviour, while Hooked accidentally reproduces those same dynamics without examining them critically.
The book generally feels like it’s written directly from unexamined assumptions about gender dynamics, creating what feels less like a deliberate exploration of power and consent and more like an unconscious perpetuation of harmful stereotypes.
Like I said, representation in fiction doesn’t need to be perfect or pedagogical.
But there’s a meaningful difference between an author exploring difficult themes with intention and one simply regurgitating their biases onto the page. Hooked falls firmly into the latter category.
For me, this book serves primarily as a reminder that not all retellings are created equal, and that slapping familiar character names onto problematic relationship dynamics doesn’t constitute meaningful adaptation.
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