Hopeless

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Reminders of Him, It Starts with Us, It Ends with Us, and All Your Perfects comes the beginning of Sky and Dean’s passionate love story—where well-kept secrets threaten to opens wounds of a dark past.

Would you rather know a truth that makes you feel hopeless, or keep believing the lies?

Beloved and bestselling author Colleen Hoover returns with the spellbinding story of two young people with devastating pasts who embark on a passionate, intriguing journey to discover the lessons of life, love, trust—and above all, the healing power that only truth can bring.

Sky, a senior in high school, meets Dean Holder, a guy with a promiscuous reputation that rivals her own. From their very first encounter, he terrifies and captivates her. Something about him sparks memories of her deeply troubled past, a time she’s tried so hard to bury. Though Sky is determined to stay far away from him, his unwavering pursuit and enigmatic smile break down her defenses and the intensity of the bond between them grows. But the mysterious Holder has been keeping secrets of his own, and once they are revealed, Sky is changed forever and her ability to trust may be a casualty of the truth.

Only by courageously facing the stark revelations can Sky and Holder hope to heal their emotional scars and find a way to live and love without boundaries. Hopeless is a novel that will leave you breathless, entranced, and remembering your own first love.

Colleen Hoover is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty-three novels, including It Starts with Us, It Ends with Us, All Your Perfects, Ugly Love, and Verity. Colleen lives in Texas with her husband and their three boys. For more information, please visit ColleenHoover.com

Hopeless by Colleen Hoover is a deeply emotional, often devastating contemporary romance that follows Sky Davis, a seemingly ordinary teenage girl whose life starts to unravel the moment she meets Dean Holder. On the surface, Sky is a typical senior: she’s home-schooled, lives with her unconventional adoptive mother Karen, rarely uses technology, and is known at her former school for having a “reputation” because she’s kissed a lot of boys without ever feeling anything real. The key detail, though, is that Sky doesn’t remember most of her childhood before the age of thirteen. She has small fragments, but no clear sense of what her early years were like. This missing past hangs in the background of her life, unexplored and unexplained, until Holder enters the picture and triggers memories she didn’t know she had.

Sky first encounters Holder at a grocery store, and she is instantly struck by him in a way she has never experienced before. Unlike all the other boys she’s kissed without emotion, Holder makes her feel an intense, almost frightening attraction. He is moody, intense, and carries his own reputation for violence and trouble after an incident at his previous school. From the beginning, their connection is complicated by his strange behavior—sometimes he seems drawn to her, other times he pulls away or acts like he knows something he won’t say. Sky senses that he’s hiding something, and that whatever he’s hiding is somehow linked to her. This creates a romantic tension layered with unease. She wants to know him, but she’s also scared of what he might reveal.

Their relationship grows quickly despite the warning signs. Sky, who has never truly felt romantic or sexual attraction, is suddenly overwhelmed by desire and emotional intensity. Holder, meanwhile, vacillates between tenderness and frustration, constantly hinting that there are truths Sky doesn’t remember. As they spend more time together, he becomes a source of comfort and safety for her, but also the person who pushes her toward difficult revelations. Sky learns that Holder once knew a little girl named Hope, a girl who disappeared years ago and whose loss has haunted him ever since. The more Holder looks at Sky, the more certain he becomes that she is somehow connected to Hope. His insistence on their shared past frightens Sky but also forces her to question why her memories are missing and why her mother has always been so strict about technology, schooling, and privacy.

The mystery of Sky’s past starts to unravel through small clues and emotional breakdowns. She experiences flashes of memory, nightmares, and physical reactions to certain places and names. Eventually, with Holder’s help and determination, they begin to piece together that Sky is not just Sky—she is Hope. As a child, she was taken from her biological family under traumatic circumstances, and her identity was changed. This revelation is not simple or joyful; it opens the door to a deeper, darker truth about why she had to be taken away. Sky’s blocked memories slowly begin to surface, and what she discovers is horrifying: her childhood was marked by sexual abuse at the hands of someone who should have protected her.

The book handles this subject bluntly but with emotional sensitivity. It shows how Sky’s mind protected her by burying the memories, and how the return of those memories shakes her entire sense of self. She has to confront that her biological father abused her and that her biological mother failed to stop it, choosing denial over protection. The people she should have been able to trust most were the ones who harmed her. Because of this, Karen’s decision to take Hope and give her a new life as Sky—while legally and morally complicated—is framed as an act of desperate rescue. Sky’s missing years and Karen’s unusual parenting choices start to make sense. The earlier restrictions on technology, public school, and dating are shown in a new light: Karen was trying to give Sky a quiet, safe, controlled world in which she could heal, even if she never spoke the full truth.

Holder’s role in this process is crucial. He is wracked with guilt because he was a child too when Hope disappeared, and he feels he failed to protect her. In the present, he becomes fiercely protective and deeply supportive as Sky remembers what happened. Their romance intensifies, but it is not just about attraction anymore; it becomes a bond forged in shared trauma and mutual determination to face the past. Sky leans on him as she confronts the abuse, her anger, and her grief, while Holder tries to balance his own regret and rage with being what she needs. Their relationship is messy and imperfect—he makes mistakes, she pushes him away—but there is a core of genuine care that anchors them both.

As Sky recovers her memories, she also has to decide what to do with the truth. She grapples with whether to report the abuse, whether to confront her biological mother, and how to handle the knowledge that her life was built on a hidden, terrible history. The book doesn’t rush this process or present healing as quick. Sky breaks down more than once. She questions whether she can ever trust herself and others again. She also feels guilty that she didn’t remember sooner, even though intellectually she knows her mind was protecting her. Colleen Hoover focuses on the emotional layers of trauma—shame, anger, numbing, fear—and shows that there is no simple way to “move on.” Love, in this story, is not a cure, but it is a powerful support.

The title Hopeless plays with multiple meanings throughout the book. On the surface, it might refer to how hopeless Sky sometimes feels, or to Hope, the little girl who seemingly vanished. But as the story progresses, it becomes clear that the word also carries irony. Sky begins in a place of emotional numbness, believing she is incapable of deep feeling, and her life is built on lies and missing pieces. That looks like hopelessness. Yet through confronting her past, accepting her identity as Hope, demanding justice, and choosing to love Holder despite her fears, she starts to build a future that is not defined solely by trauma. The hopeless girl becomes someone who is capable of hope, even if that hope is fragile and hard-won.

Near the end, Sky takes steps toward reclaiming her narrative. She faces the truth, makes decisions about legal action, and reshapes her relationships with the adults who failed her and the one who saved her. Holder remains by her side, but the emphasis is on Sky’s own strength and ability to survive. The ending is not perfectly tidy or completely healed, but it offers a sense of forward motion. Sky has gone from a girl with no memories and no real emotional connection to anyone, to a young woman who knows the full story of her life and is choosing how to live with it.

Overall, Hopeless is a romance woven tightly with psychological drama and trauma recovery. It uses the love story between Sky and Holder as both a comfort and a catalyst, but never pretends that romance alone fixes deep wounds. Instead, it paints a realistic, often painful picture of what it means to uncover buried abuse, confront betrayal, and still dare to believe in love and a future. The book is intense, sometimes overwhelming, but ultimately about survival, courage, and the hard work of turning something broken into something that can still grow.