45 pages • 1 hour read
Tessa BaileyHook, Line, and Sinker
Tessa BaileyFiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Hannah Bellinger
Hannah Bellinger is the protagonist, female romantic lead, and one of the point-of-view characters. She is 26, blonde, and pretty, but she tends to be understated in her manner and wears a ball cap and tennis shoes as part of her usual outfit more often than a dress and heels. She is warm-hearted, loyal, and can be fierce about protecting those she loves. As the novel progresses, she wears more flamboyant clothing, signaling how she is stepping out from her role of the supportive sister and friend and into that of a leading lady.
Hannah works as a production assistant, the bottom rung of the movie ladder, because she didn’t want to use her famous stepfather to leverage a position higher up in the industry. When the story opens, she’s had a crush on Sergei, the director of the film production company she works for, for two years. This attraction begins to fade, however, after Hannah gets involved with Fox Thornton.
Hannah is defined by her love of music. She uses songs to communicate her moods and feelings; songs are her way of interpreting the world. She takes pleasure in being able to match a song with atmosphere and wants to use that in a career making movie soundtracks. The narrative reflects from her point of view: “Music could cut her straight down the middle. Nothing else in her life had the power to do that” (165). Music helps establish the connection Hannah comes to feel with her father, Henry Cross, a king crab fisherman from Westport who died when Hannah was a baby.
Hannah is more understated and private than her flamboyant sister, and has grown up in Piper’s shadow to some degree. Hannah’s character arc in the novel is shaped by her wish to go from a supporting actress role, which she has always played with her sister and friends, to being a leading lady in her own life. Hannah’s growing feeling of disconnection to her life in Los Angeles is contrasted by her growing comfort in the more grounded atmosphere of Westport.
Hannah has a strong sense of self-respect and self-preservation. She’s not the type to take risks or to do something thoughtless, which keeps her from falling into bed with Fox when she first meets him. She’s not interested in superficial hookups but is interested in him as a person; she guesses from the beginning that it means something that he gave her the Fleetwood Mac album. Her supportiveness is ultimately the quality that helps Fox comes to terms with the insecurities that are holding him back from love.
Fox Thornton
Fox Thornton is the male romantic lead, Hannah’s love interest, and the second point-of-view character in the novel. He is 31 when the novel opens, tall and tanned with dark blond hair, muscular, tattooed, and extremely attractive to women.
Fox’s father was a fisherman, as is Fox, and his mother, Charlene, runs bingo nights up and down the coast. His parents divorced when he was young due to his father’s affairs, and Fox was raised by his mother. From a young age, Fox was defined by his attractiveness and was very sexually active in high school, partly because it seemed that was what everyone expected of him. Now he is defined by his success with women, a man “well used to being wanted and knowing what to do about it” (85).
Fox dislikes his shallow, superficial reputation as a lady killer. He keeps it partly as a defense mechanism and partly because he feels he can’t escape that label. After he saw how his father behaved with women, Fox determined not to be like him, and wanted to prove he was capable of commitment. In college, he dated a woman named Melinda only to find that she wasn’t serious about him and regarded him as a fling while she was involved with his roommate and business partner. Fox was so deeply hurt by this betrayal that he determined to confine himself to the stereotype everyone expected of him; for much of the novel he wears a leather bracelet to remind himself that he is just like his father. At the beginning of the novel, Fox believes that he can’t hope for a real relationship with a woman, and may not be capable of one. He pretends he is not bothered at being defined by his sexual exploits or being teased about them, as he is by his crewmates. He thinks that if he laughs first, then the joke’s not on him.
Though he doesn’t see it in himself at first, Fox is in fact loyal, responsible, capable, and resilient. He can fix a boat, captain a ship, and cook. He’s been friends with several of his crewmates, including Brendan, since high school. Brendan trusts Fox to be his relief skipper even when Fox doesn’t think he deserves, or can handle, the responsibility of being captain. And Fox loves his mother and takes every opportunity to see her even when he thinks he’s a disappointment to her, proving that he cares for others even at a cost to himself.
By the end of the novel, Fox experiences Self-Growth Through Romance. With Hannah’s help, he comes to see that he is ready for a relationship; he realizes that he is not like his father, but capable of so much more.
Sergei
Sergei is a young Russian man, the director of a film production company called Storm Born, where Hannah works. He serves mainly as a rival love interest for Hannah and therefore a foil for Fox, or a character who highlights another character’s traits through contrasting ones. He is slender, artistic, and often makes spontaneous decisions that Hannah sees as creative, but which others might see as disruptive.
Despite Hannah’s initial crush on him, Sergei serves as little more than a plot device. Sergei, Hannah, and Fox are briefly in a love triangle, a common trope in romance. Sergei supports Hannah’s exploration of the musical side of movie-making, first by giving her permission to shadow the music coordinator, and then by asking for a demo of Henry’s sea shanties to consider for the movie score. Sergei’s growing interest in Hannah and his very cautious advances serve to make Fox jealous, but Hannah is honest and admits early on that her interest in Sergei pales in comparison to what she feels for Fox. In the end, Sergei expresses disappointment that Hannah will be leaving his company, but he doesn’t have anything to offer that will tempt her to stay.
Henry and Opal Cross
Opal Cross is Henry’s mother and Hannah’s grandmother. In It Happened One Summer, Opal was guarded and still mired in grief over the loss of her son, but she thawed when meeting Piper and Hannah. Opal is happy to see Hannah even though she has come to know Piper better after Piper moved to Westport. She understands Hannah well enough to know that Hannah, and not Piper, will appreciate the songs that Henry wrote. Opal is touched and grateful when Hannah arranges for Opal to be paid royalties on the songs, since that means financial income. She is even more moved that the songs have been set to music, as she feels she can hear her son speaking to her after all this time.
Piper remembers Henry’s laugh, but Hannah can remember nothing. Hannah helped Piper renovate Henry’s bar, now Cross and Daughters, but felt she was supporting Piper more than connecting with Henry. When she hears Henry’s songs set to music, however, Hannah feels connected with her father for the first time. She understands his love for his family and the conflict he felt about also loving the sea. Henry’s love of music is a piece of him that Hannah imagines she might have inherited and makes her feel like his daughter at last.
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