Losing hope

Overview

"Losing Hope" retells the events of Colleen Hoover's "Hopeless" through the eyes of Dean Holder, the boy whose own history remained mostly offstage in the first book. Where that earlier novel followed Sky as she pieced together a buried childhood, this companion turns inward on Holder, a young man who has spent years quietly looking for a girl who disappeared from his life without explanation.

When their paths finally cross again, the reunion he had imagined bringing relief instead opens up new layers of guilt. Rather than settling the questions he has carried, finding her again forces him to sit with regrets he had never fully faced, and to reckon with how much of his own identity was built around her absence.

The novel frames healing as something that cannot be rushed or willed into being. Holder's path toward peace runs directly through the parts of his past he would rather avoid, and the book follows him as he learns that moving forward means revisiting, rather than outrunning, what came before.

A Companion Told From the Other Side

Pairing two novels around a single story from opposite vantage points was, at the time of its release, a distinctive structural choice for Hoover, and "Losing Hope" helped cement the author's reputation for pairing emotionally intense romance with threads of unresolved trauma. By handing the narration to Holder, the book shifts the emotional center of gravity: a character who read as mysterious and guarded in "Hopeless" becomes someone whose interior life, guilt, and grief are laid bare.

That shift also lets the book explore how young men process loss and culpability, subjects given comparatively little space in much YA and new-adult fiction of the period. The novel's popularity alongside its predecessor helped establish the companion-novel format as a recurring feature of Hoover's later work, in which the same events are revisited from a second character's perspective to deepen, rather than simply repeat, the original story.

Why Losing Hope Has Been Challenged

A parent raising concerns with a school library committee argued that the novel's depiction of sexual assault and its aftermath was too explicit for the shelves students could browse without restriction, pointing to specific passages as evidence the book belonged with an older readership than the one checking it out. Other objections raised in review meetings have centered on the frank treatment of teenage sexual activity and profanity throughout the narrative, with some arguing that the material normalizes behavior they consider inappropriate for a school setting regardless of the trauma narrative surrounding it. Defenders in those same discussions have countered that the book's handling of abuse and grief is not gratuitous but integral to its portrait of a young man learning to process guilt he has carried since childhood. In the catalog tracked here, the novel has drawn 2 state-level and 4 district-level challenges, reflecting a broader pattern in which Hoover's work is singled out for its combination of romantic content and unflinching trauma depiction.