by Jenny (link)
Genre het, romance, drama
Pairings Isaac/OFC, Taylor/OFC, Zac/OFC
Length 55 chapters and epilogue
Status Completed (with sequel)
Right away, I have a bad feeling about You Are My Hope. The author has evidently edited it at some point, but has left the original eight chapters on the website. I’m not going to read them, since she claims the newer ones are better. Whatever was considered teenybopper in 1998 is definitely not anything I want to read now.
Even the edited beginning hits every possibly teenybopper cliche — a story narrated by two characters (one very nearly named after the author — Jenn versus Jenny) who happen to be Hanson fans and dump a lot of exposition, including how they look, into the short first chapter.
It doesn’t get much better from there on. Random point of view shifts — not just from character to character, but sometimes from first to third person — aside, the plot is pretty typical for all the bashing of teenybopper fans. Seems to me that Jenny was trying a little too hard to prove what she wasn’t.
Those point of view shifts get even more confusing when the couples start slipping up and cheating. It’s hard for me to keep track of who’s with who, let alone who’s narrating at any given time. That cheating appears to make up the primary conflict in the plot, along with the occasional references to obsessive Hanson fans possibly discovering that the boys have girlfriends. That’s about as deep as the plot gets, with much more of it revolving around silly, melodramatic teenage romantic problems and sex scenes that really don’t serve any purpose and aren’t all that enjoyable to read.
There’s really little in You Are My Hope to recommend it. The plot gets closer to something interesting near the end, but even then it isn’t handled with any sort of grace. The writing has improved by that point, too, but even that doesn’t mean a lot considering how it began. I have no doubt there are other stories that tackle subjects like rape and teenage pregnancy with far better results than in this story. There is a sequel, The Cream Filling, but a few chapters seem to have been gone missing. I don’t feel like I’m missing out on much by not reading it.
Review by Bethany (website)