Not quite unrecognizable: Jensen's James Benjamin Hookbridge of 17th-century Bristol is a hard man and a dandy, but that's about as far as it goes - where Barrie's Captain Hook is a fool and a coward, Jensen's is a revelation, as much an update of the Flying Dutchman as of any pulp villain. Just as Maguire's book (and the ghastly, unlistenable Broadway musical it spawned) attempts to fashion a hero out of the The Wizard of Oz's Wicked Witch of the West, Jensen's book gives us a new and very different version of the villainous Captain Hook who stalks through J. Alias Hook by Lisa Jensen Thomas Dunne Books, 2014 The ready accusation of opportunism that rises in the throat of any reader encountering something like Lisa Jensen's Alias Hook falls silent almost immediately upon reading, and that's a very happy thing on the surface, the book looks like just another grab at the mega-success of Gregory Maguire's Wicked, which wildly popularized the gimmick of injecting some sympathy into the story of a well-known fictional villain.
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