Hush, Hush

Fitzpatrick, B. (2009). Hush, Hush. New York: Simon & Schuster BFYF. ISBN 978-1-4169-8941-7

Why read this book

Why is that bad guy so attractive? Should you be in control so you don’t get in trouble or should you follow your feelings to see what you discover? That’s Nora’s dilemma when the cool new but kind of sinister senior takes an interest in her.

Plot summary

Nora Grey is a 16-year-old sophomore who lives in a farmhouse outside a small town near the Maine coast. Her mother has a job that keeps her out of town quite a bit, and her father was murdered a year earlier in robbery, so Nora is pretty independent. She handles her independence well, focusing on her school work, until she gets a new biology partner, a guy name Patch. Patch is new to school, he’s cute, he’s a bit sinister, and from their first encounter he beams his attention straight on Nora in ways that excite her and make her nervous.

Threatening events start complicating Nora’s life shortly after she meets Patch. Nora starts hearing voices as if someone has invaded her mind. She thinks she sees a peeping Tom outside her bedroom window. Someone seems to be following her when she is out about town. She thinks she hits someone while driving home in the fog but then there’s no evidence that it ever happened. On a dark night, her best friend Vee is mugged while she is wearing Nora’s jacket. Is Nora imagining these things? Is there some connection to her father’s murder? Is there some connection to Patch?

Despite the warnings, the more time Nora spends with Patch the more she falls for him. She knows he has secrets – like those two long scars on his back – and she wants to dig them out, even though she knows he’s manipulating her every step of the way.

Critical evaluation

My first foray into the angel genre of young-adult literature was a fun read. As with vampire stories, the sexual tension between danger and desire makes for a page-turner. There’s plenty of action to keep the plot running through the book’s nearly 400 pages, and the characters are as lively as the plot. Nora is a pretty sophisticated 16-year-old, with a lot of spunk, and Patch is convincing as a maybe-kind-of-bad guy who you want to think is good inside.

Hush, Hush engaged me because of the possibility through most of the book that it wasn’t really an angel fantasy but a psychological thriller. Although the prologue, which relates some kind of deal between a fallen angel and a young nobleman in the medieval French countryside, defines the territory clearly from the beginning, the fact that Nora lost her father only a year earlier to a violent assault keeps alive the possibility that she is experiencing some kind of psychological trauma from that event. Is Nora an unreliable first-person narrator who will come to see that her mind has invented the threats she seems to experience? If Fitzpatrick had developed that angle, or at least let the ambivalence of the situation prevail to the end, she might have a piece of literature as well as an entertaining, good-read of a book.

About the author

Becca Fitzpatrick was born in 1979 and currently lives in Colorado. She spent five years writing Hush, Hush, which is her first novel. She is currently working on a sequel, Crescendo, which she plans to publish in fall 2010. She maintains a Web site and a blog.

Genre: Romance, Supernatural powers

Curriculum ties

This is an entertaining read that is appropriate for an independent reading list for middle school and high school students, but it’s not likely to be used in literature or history classes.

Book-talking ideas

• Play the audio presentation of the first chapter of Hush, Hush, available on Fitzpatrick’s Web site.

• Show the Fallen Archangels Web site, which presents a YouTube video of Becca Fitzpatrick talking about how she wrote the book and a print interview with the hot model featured on the hot cover of Hush, Hush.

Reading level/interest age

Most middle school and high school students with an interest in angels would find Hush, Hush to be accessible reading.

Challenge issues

Although sexual tension permeates the novel, there is no explicit sex. The threat of violence hangs in the air throughout, but there isn’t much actual violence and what's there is handled in a PG kind of way. Religious groups who oppose the popular fascination with angels are likely to find this book objectionable.

Responses

• Remind the challenger of the policy (in the case of the San Francisco Public Library) to present “all points of view on current and historical issues. Materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.”

Why I chose to read this book

One of the groups in our course that reported on young-adult genres featured Hush, Hush, and since I hadn’t read any young-adult suspense or fantasy novels I thought it might be a good place to start.

References

Becca Fitzpatrick. (n.d.). Retrieved November 22, 2009, from http://beccafitzpatrick.com

Hush, Hush cover week. (2009, November 9-13). Fallenarchangel.com. Retrieved November 22, 2009, from http://www.fallenarchangel.com