45 pages • 1 hour read
Hook, Line, and Sinker
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Background
Series Context: The Bellinger Sisters
Hook, Line, and Sinker is the second in a duology, two novels featuring the Bellinger sisters, Hannah and Piper. The sisters were born in the small fishing town of Westport, Washington. Their father, Henry Cross, was swept overboard while he and his men were out fishing for king crab and died. Their mother, Maureen, moved to Los Angeles and met Daniel Bellinger, a movie producer. The girls have grown up wealthy and well taken care of in their mansion in Bel Air.
In the first novel in the set, It Happened One Summer, Piper, who is famous for her good looks and style, gets in trouble, and Daniel sends her to Westport to do something about a bar that Henry had left the girls. Hannah goes with Piper for moral support. While there, the girls meet their grandmother, Opal Cross, learn more about their father, and decide to renovate and reopen the bar, renaming it Cross and Daughters.
Piper falls in love with boat captain Brendan Taggart. Hannah is introduced to Fox Thornton, Brendan’s relief skipper, a good-looking and footloose type with a reputation as a lady killer. The two first meet when Fox steers an angry Hannah away from defending Piper to Brendan. Fox shows Hannah the local record store as a distraction, a scene included as a bonus at the end of the 2021 Avon paperback of It Happened One Summer.
Elsewhere in It Happened One Summer, Hannah and Fox accompany Piper and Brendan on a weekend trip to Seattle. Brendan warns Fox to be careful of Hannah’s feelings. Hannah and Fox spend time at a record expo, listening to music. Before she leaves town, Fox gives Hannah a going-away gift: a Fleetwood Mac album that she wanted to buy but didn’t.
While Piper stays in Westport with Brendan, Hannah returns to LA. She feels that the album is a meaningful gift, but everyone has warned her not to get involved with Fox. She cautiously pursues a friendship with him that develops through the text messages that open Hook, Line, and Sinker. The friends-to-lovers arc, a trope in romantic comedic fiction, charts the course for Hannah and Fox’s relationship in the second book. Hook, Line, and Sinker also gives glimpses into the passionate relationship between Piper and Brendan, who are now engaged to be married.
Authorial Context: Tessa Bailey
Bailey is a prolific and bestselling author of romance fiction, publishing both independently and with traditional publishers. Before the Bellinger Sisters series in 2021, she released nearly 50 contemporary romance novels. Promising on her author website that her books deliver “heat, laughter, and happily ever after,” Bailey writes that her books also feature “sexy, heartfelt, humorous romance” (Bailey, Tessa. “Tessa Bailey.” Tessabailey.com). This is especially true of novels like her Line of Duty, Crossing the Line, and Academy series, which feature heroes who are police officers or police officers in training in Chicago and New York City.
Bailey has said in interviews that she likes to write characters who are at a transition period in their lives, as this makes them vulnerable and more open to falling in love. This is the case with her Romancing the Clarkson series, which is about a set of siblings who experience adventure and find love while on a road trip across the US. Often, Bailey’s heroines experience upheavals in their life, like the leads from the Hot and Hammered trilogy, or create upheaval in the orderly lives of their heroes, like in her Girl series. Releases following the Bellinger Sisters series include the holiday romance Window Shopping, a heroine encountering three different suitors in Happenstance, and a dash of murder mystery in My Killer Vacation. Bailey responds to trends in popular fiction, as with her vampire series, Fate.
Bailey’s books are considered “sensual” or “steamy” on the heat index for romance books and include explicit sex. Most of her pairings are between heterosexual men and women, though she has written romances between men. Bailey is influenced by popular culture. It Happened One Summer is inspired by characters from the sitcom Schitt’s Creek. The musical references in Hook, Line, and Sinker move from Billie Holliday and Al Green to 1990s grunge to lesser-known folk and alternative singers, covering a range of cultural references. Her works include humor, sensuality, and pop culture with plots driven by character growth.
Literary Context: Contemporary Romance
The romantic comedy is a popular category of contemporary romance, a consistently popular fiction genre. While a traditional feature of romance is the happy ending—known in the trade as the “happily ever after” or HEA—contemporary romances can venture into dark or painful subject matter. Romantic comedies, in contrast, tend to feature young and attractive leads, a strong element of humor, and circumstances that can tend toward the quirky or ridiculous. While writers may not shy away from painful subjects, the overall tone of rom coms tends to be happy and light as characters overcome their obstacles and grow in personal awareness through their love relationship. Hook, Line, and Sinker is a romantic comedy; the brightly colored, cartoon-like cover, a popular trend at the time of publication, communicates the book’s bright, humorous tone to readers.
Contemporary romances rely on a consistent plot structure, and familiar character types, tropes, and techniques. Romantic comedies typically feature the “meet cute,” when the leads meet under unusual circumstances and make a vivid impression on one another. Unlike the erotica genre, an emotional attachment develops along with sexual attraction. Additionally, characters’ life obstacles are resolved by the success of their romantic attachment. Evergreen tropes include enemies-to-lovers, friends-to-lovers, proximity (when the couple is forced into close quarters, and sparks fly), marriage of convenience (when the couple pretends to date, but feelings develop), and big-city-versus-small-town, the premise of It Happened One Summer.
Hook, Line, and Sinker is largely patterned on the friends-to-lovers trope. Hannah and Fox both have decided not to get romantically involved during Hannah’s visit—resolutions which naturally fly out the window in the face of overpowering sexual attraction. Hannah also has a touch of the girl-next-door; she looks like Piper’s kid sister to everyone except Fox, who sees her sexual allure. Another driving trope of Hook, Line, and Sinker is the reformed rake, which is especially popular in historical romances but also appears in contemporary romance. In this trope, a man with a reputation for sexual promiscuity and a resistance to attachment changes his ways for the heroine, who proves worthy of his devotion and fidelity.
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