Hooked on You Review — Is It Worth Reading?

Verdict: A gentle, genuinely warm romance between two 51-year-old women who meet over a crochet hook, held back by a pace that tests patience and a cruel boyfriend subplot that some readers find hard to forgive.

Best for: Readers who want older heroines, a slow friendship-first romance and a cosy London craft-shop setting, and who are happy to trade plot and tension for quiet domestic detail.

Heat level: ★★★☆☆ (3/5 — open door, per romance.io)

Rating: ★★★★☆ (3.5/5 — a 3.74 Goodreads average from a book readers like more than they love, with pace the dominant complaint)

Tropes: Later-in-life queer awakening, slow burn, friends to lovers, older heroines, bisexual awakening, divorced parents, disabled veteran heroine, craft-shop romance, low angst, London setting.

Hooked on You is Jenn Matthews’s 2019 debut from Ylva Publishing, a standalone contemporary lesbian romance set around a small London craft shop, in which Anna, a bored English teacher whose life looks settled on paper, signs up for a crochet class and finds herself drawn to Ollie, the ex-soldier who teaches it and who has already decided that the feisty new student is straight.

Seven years on, it sits at a 3.74 average across 518 Goodreads ratings — and it is still Matthews’s most-read book. The distribution is unusual. Only 6% of ratings are one or two stars, but only 19% are five: this is a book most readers settle on as pleasant rather than special. Why it lands in that middle is worth understanding before you start.

What Is Hooked on You About?

This is a later-in-life romance first and a slow burn second. Both women are 51, both are divorced, both have grown or nearly grown children, and the book is interested in what it means to start over at that age rather than in the age itself. That puts it squarely on the quiet end of sapphic romance: family dinners, class nights, awkward conversations with adult children, and very little external plot.

Anna has a job she is good at, two kids she loves and a boyfriend she finds increasingly hard to like, and what she lacks is any sense of wanting something for herself. Ollie has the opposite problem: she knows exactly who she is, but carries a war injury, a strained relationship with her grown children and a past she is not proud of. The book moves between the two of them in third person, which lets the reader see each woman misread the other long before either admits anything.

What Makes This Later-in-Life Sapphic Romance Work

Two heroines past fifty: The single most praised element. Reviewer after reviewer names the age of the leads as the reason they picked the book up and the reason they stayed, and several say the book never treats that age as a joke or a novelty.
The crochet class: Ollie’s weekly group works as a small found family, and readers enjoy the craft detail. One reader who crochets enjoyed it while admitting the terms could lose anyone who does not — worth knowing either way.
Friendship before romance: This is friends to lovers done patiently. Readers repeatedly describe the relationship as built with care and respect for each woman’s circumstances.
A low-drama awakening: Anna’s realisation about her attraction to women is handled as self-discovery rather than crisis, which readers who have had enough of coming-out trauma appreciate.
Almost no angst between the leads: The Lesbian Review called it an angst-free escape, and on StoryGraph 90% of readers tag the mood as lighthearted.

Book Synopsis

Anna Rose is 51, teaches English at a secondary school and has a life that runs on routine. Her grown daughter is outspoken, her adopted son is autistic and needs her more than he lets on, and her boyfriend, Liam, is the kind of man she stays with mainly because leaving would take effort. When her daughter tells her she needs a hobby, Anna ends up in a London craft shop with every intention of learning to knit.

The shop belongs to Ollie Williams, also 51, a former soldier whose leg was badly damaged by a bomb and who now lives with chronic pain and a history she rarely talks about. Ollie runs a crochet class one evening a week for a small group of regulars who are as much a support network as a class. She notices Anna immediately, and just as immediately files her under unavailable: Anna has a boyfriend, and as far as Ollie can tell she is as straight as they come.

Week by week, stitch by stitch, the two become friends. Anna finds she looks forward to class more than anything else in her week, and that her feelings about Liam are getting harder to explain away. Ollie, meanwhile, has to decide whether hoping for more is worth the risk of losing the friendship — and whether a woman who has only just started asking herself the question will ever answer it the way Ollie wants.

My Review

What this book gets right, it gets quietly and consistently right. Two women in their fifties, with ex-husbands, children and bodies that have been through things, fall in love without the book once suggesting that this is late, sad or remarkable. That sounds like a low bar. In sapphic romance it is not, and the readers who found this book tend to say exactly that.

The second strength is the friendship. Matthews takes her time letting Anna and Ollie become people who genuinely enjoy each other before either admits to anything more, and the crochet class gives that friendship a structure — the same room, the same night, a small cast of regulars watching it happen. On StoryGraph, 88% of readers call the characters loveable and 80% call the book character-driven, and that is the right description. Ollie in particular, with her injury, her guilt and her dry humour, is a heroine you rarely meet.

The problem readers name most often is pace, and it is not a personal gripe. 72% of StoryGraph readers mark it slow, and the low-star Goodreads reviews say it bluntly: too long, meandering, the romance taking too much time to seal the deal. Around 300 pages with very little external conflict is a lot of quiet. The second issue is Liam. He is written as uncomplicated cruelty, including toward Anna’s autistic son, and Anna takes a long time to leave him — long enough that one specialist reviewer questioned the choice and at least one autistic reader decided not to read the book at all. The prologue’s reveal that Ollie cheated on her husband while coming to terms with being a lesbian divides readers too, though fewer of them.

Reset one expectation before you start. The blurb promises a quirky romance, and that is fair, but the book reads less like a romantic comedy and more like a slice-of-life novel about two families adjusting. If slow and gentle is what drew you, relax — it is exactly that. If you need a plot to pull you through, calibrate: the tension here is almost entirely internal.

My honest note: A warm, respectful older-women romance that is easy to like and easy to put down. If you want heroines past fifty treated as romantic leads and you do not mind a slow walk, it is a pleasant one; if an unhurried pace or a lingering bad boyfriend will frustrate you, it will.

Element	In Hooked on You
Central relationship	Anna Rose & Ollie Williams — English teacher and craft-shop owner, both 51, friends to lovers
Core tropes	Later-in-life queer awakening, slow burn, friends to lovers, divorced parents, disabled veteran heroine
Setting	Contemporary London — a small craft shop and its weekly crochet class
Heat level	3/5 — open door, per romance.io
Series	Standalone — complete story with an HEA
Content notes	Emotionally abusive boyfriend, ableist slurs aimed at an autistic child, infidelity in the backstory, homophobia, misogyny, war injury, chronic pain and PTSD, sexual content

How Spicy Is Hooked on You?

A 3/5. romance.io rates Hooked on You 3 of 5 and labels it open door, and on StoryGraph sexual content is logged only as a minor note. That matches what readers describe: the intimacy comes late, after a long friendship, and it reads as warm and affectionate rather than the point of the book. Nobody picks this up for the heat, and nobody who reviews it complains about it either.

The only thing worth flagging in advance is emotional rather than sexual: Anna is still with Liam for a good stretch of the book, and his behaviour toward her son is the content readers most often warn about. For comparison, two later-in-life romances reviewed here run hotter — The Second Draft and Margin of Error both land at 4/5 with explicit open-door scenes.

Who Should Read This Book?

You’ll likely love it if: you want heroines in their fifties who are allowed to be romantic leads, you enjoy slow friendship-first romance, you like cosy settings and found-family side casts, and you prefer low angst to high drama.

You may want to skip it if: slow pacing makes you put books down, you want a plot beyond the relationship, you cannot read a character excusing cruelty toward her autistic child, or you want your romance to be spicy.

In short: A gentle older-women romance that rewards patience and punishes the reader who wanted momentum.

What Readers Are Actually Saying (September 2026)

There is no viral moment here. I found no BookTok or Instagram activity for the title and no Reddit threads, and there are no trade reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus or Library Journal — normal for a 2019 debut from an independent press. The book’s readership was built some other way. It was the Sapphic Book Club’s March 2019 pick, and several of its Goodreads reviews trace back to that. Blog coverage came from The Lesbian Review, which liked it, and Love in Panels, which had reservations. Today it keeps finding readers through Kindle Unlimited and through the audiobook, narrated by Gabrielle Baker and running 11 hours and 56 minutes. Listeners single out how clearly she separates the two women’s voices.

Prefer audio? Listen to Hooked on You on Libro.fm — the audiobook shop that supports independent bookstores.

Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The ages come first, by a distance — “early fifties” and “older women” are the recurring phrases, usually followed by how rarely readers get that. Second is tone: “sweet”, “gentle” and “cozy” recur, and one Amazon reviewer summed it up as a cozy mystery with lesbians and no mystery. Third is character work. Readers like both leads, and several say the secondary cast — the class regulars and Anna’s daughter — is what kept them reading when the romance was slow.

What readers argue about and complain about: Pace, above everything. “Slow” is the word nearly every review uses, approvingly or not, and the negative reviews turn it into “long”, “boring” and “draggy” — one DNF reviewer said it simply was not credible or interesting enough to finish. The second theme is Liam. Love in Panels objected that he repeatedly uses a slur about Anna’s son and that Anna excuses him until her daughter pushes her, and at least one autistic reader declined the book on that basis. Third, and quieter: Ollie’s infidelity, revealed in the prologue, which one reviewer predicted would put some readers off; and the crochet jargon, which splits readers depending on whether they crochet. StoryGraph (3.55 from 108 reviews) runs lower than Goodreads, which fits a book people finish contentedly rather than enthusiastically.

The standalone question worth asking first: Hooked on You is complete in one volume and ends with an HEA, so nothing depends on another book. If it works for you, Matthews’s next novel, The Words Shimmer, sits almost level on Goodreads at 3.80 across 272 ratings and also features women over forty; Reasons to Heal (3.67) and Sing for My Baby (3.76) are in the same range. Losing Touch is her highest rated at 4.50, but across only 64 ratings.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Hooked on You have a happy ending?

Yes. Anna and Ollie get a happily-ever-after, and readers who mention the ending describe it as an HEA after a few bumps. It is a standalone, so nothing is left for a sequel to resolve.

How spicy is Hooked on You?

A 3/5. romance.io rates it 3 of 5 and files it as open door, and StoryGraph readers log sexual content only as a minor note. The intimacy arrives late and is warm rather than frequent.

How old are the main characters in Hooked on You?

Both are 51. Anna is a divorced English teacher with a grown daughter and an adopted son, and Ollie is a divorced army veteran who runs a London craft shop.

Is Hooked on You a queer awakening story?

Yes, for Anna. She arrives at the crochet class in a relationship with a man and works out her attraction to Ollie over the course of the book, and readers most often describe it as a bisexual awakening handled without drama.

Is there an audiobook of Hooked on You?

Yes. Gabrielle Baker narrates the unabridged audiobook, which runs 11 hours and 56 minutes and was released in April 2019. Listeners praise how clearly she separates the two leads.

Is Hooked on You slow?

Yes, and deliberately so. 72% of StoryGraph readers call the pace slow, and the most repeated complaint in the low-star Goodreads reviews is that it drags or runs long.

If You Loved Hooked on You, Read These Next

If the ages were the draw, The Second Draft is another later-in-life friends-to-lovers romance, with more heat and more obvious humour. Margin of Error pairs a newly divorced professor with a woman in her fifties and adds a second-chance thread. Seasons of Love gives you Harper Bliss’s version of two women over forty building something slowly. For more in this lane, browse our mature lesbian romance guide and its late bloomer list, or the full Book Reviews archive.

The Bottom Line

Hooked on You sets out to give two women in their fifties an unhurried, respectful love story, and much of it works: the heroines’ ages are treated as normal, the friendship is built with care, and the crochet class gives it a warm, lived-in setting. What does not work is just as clear: the pace is slow enough to lose a lot of readers, the boyfriend subplot asks the reader to forgive too much, and there is very little plot to carry the quiet stretches. It is worth it for readers who value older heroines and low angst over momentum. Check Hooked on You on Amazon →

The Eikna Overall Ranking

On the Eikna scale, Hooked on You ranks as a gentle, low-angst later-in-life sapphic romance — warm and genuinely respectful of its fifty-something heroines, held back by a slow pace and a hard-to-forgive boyfriend subplot, and best approached for the friendship and the older leads rather than for tension or heat.