Hooked by Liz Fichera

Hooked

By Liz Fichera

Hooked Book 1

Reading Age: Young Adult

Genre: Romance, Drama, Contemporary

Published January 29th 2013 by Harlequin Teen 

Format: E-ARC

When Native American Fredricka ‘Fred’ Oday is invited to become the only girl on the school’s golf team, she can’t say no. This is an opportunity to shine, win a scholarship and go to university, something no one in her family has done.

But Fred’s presence on the team isn’t exactly welcome — especially not to rich golden boy Ryan Berenger, whose best friend was kicked off the team to make a spot for Fred.

But there’s no denying that things are happening between the girl with the killer swing and the boy with the killer smile...

I thought I would love this one, it looked romantic, cute and interesting.  Unfortunately I found it to be none of these things.  I feel like sometimes authors go overboard with the drama, like they do not know when to stop.  Hooked fell into that category for me.  There was drama, after drama, after drama and everything that could go wrong did.

I might have been more able to handle the drama if the character were stronger.  Fred’s defence against the bullying and racism she suffers is to look down at her feet and pretend she doesn’t exist.  I wanted her to have more fight and more backbone.  She was a nice character but I wished she had put her foot down more

Ryan was even worse; I really didn’t like him at all.  He was a spoilt little rich kid who spent most of his time feeling sorry for himself and being really angry.  If Fred was not going to defend herself then I needed him to, but that rarely happened he was even more of a wet blanket then she was.  His best friend is the one bullying her and he just lets him, it is hard to think of him and Fred romantically when he lets his best friend treat her so poorly.

On a wider scale, and it does not apply to this book only, this genre is starting to annoy me.  All these YA contemporary romances seem to feature parents who are either abusive, alcoholic, ignorant, bullies, unkind, uncaring or a mixture of them all.  I understand that there are parents like that out there but YA books seem to feature towns and schools where all the kids barely have one good parent between them.  Kids can have problems that have nothing to do with parenting.  It is just beginning to grate on my nerves a bit.

It was not all bad.  The writing was good and the idea interesting.  The parts where golf was involved really stood out and was really enjoyable.

Hooked is not a bad book but it was not for me either.  

2 out of 5 stars

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