Hopeless

After the publication of Hopeless, Colleen Hoover published three additional titles about Sky Davis and Dean Holder, which are packaged together as the Finding Hope series. It is unclear whether the story of Sky and Holder chronicled in Hopeless was intended to be read as a stand-alone, or whether Hoover had larger visions from the beginning.

In recycling characters and revisiting plots, some authors of book series are accused of crass commercialization as they turn popular characters into essentially cash cows. But the series does more than make authors richer. The concept redefines narrative itself. A series defies the logic of an ending and reminds readers that the narrative plotline of characters’ lives, like the narrative plotline of the reader’s own life, is only arbitrarily stopped. Life goes on, and any novel’s plot is necessarily, even inevitably, incomplete. Although any character’s life can be extended by the reader beyond the ending of the story, a series upends the assumption that a novel is in and of itself complete.

Hoover’s follow-up novel, Losing Hope (2013), is not so much a sequel as a parallel narrative. Hoover explores Holder’s life from the moment of his sister’s death by suicide and fills in his family’s backstory, including the disturbing information that his own parents knew about the abuse next door. The third and fourth volumes—the novellas Finding Cinderella (2013) and Finding Perfect (2016)—focus on the character Six and her efforts to find her way to a stable relationship. Sky and Holder, now with kids, make cameo appearances to affirm they have found a life together based on honesty and trust, sustained by their certainty that in facing their darks pasts together, they fused their hearts and souls. Thus, for Hoover, the series demonstrates the idea Holder expresses in the last chapters of Hopeless: the possibility of a happily-enough-ever-after fairy tale, set in the real world.