Hopeless

Content Warning: The novel contains depictions of incest, sexual abuse, alcohol abuse, and death by suicide.

Gripping the edges of a bed, a nameless first-person narrator repeatedly promises not to cry. She glances at the mirror and detests the image she sees, a “girl I no longer know” (1). She flings boxes stacked in the room and tells someone named Holder, who tries to hold her close, to leave her alone. He tells her to leave the room.

Seventeen-year-old Sky Davis, with the help of her friend Six, sneaks some boys into her bedroom through the window for an impromptu party of movies, ice cream, and casual making-out—but no sex. “I am not a s***” (4), Sky says, using a slur for a sexually active woman. Six will soon leave for a study abroad semester in Italy. Sky’s adoptive mother, Karen, is gone for the evening. Sky notes how her stepmother resists technology—they have no television, computer, Internet, or smartphones: “[Karen] believes technology is the root of all evil” (6). Sky has been homeschooled her whole life but is preparing in a few days to begin her senior year at the local high school, determined to find out what high school is really like.