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What a nostalgia read!



I have read Hush Hush only once, and I hate it. It has been more than a decade since I read this book. I want to see if this book held up.



When I finished reading Hush, Hush, I had to mull it over for a while. I really wasn’t sure what to say. I am absolutely love the cover (athletic looking, darkly mysterious fallen angel, contorted in midair in gray-scale? What’s not to like?).



It didn’t work.



Inside was the most confused piece of writing I’ve read in some time. Becca Fitzpatrick didn’t seem to know quite what she wanted, only that it had to be Ominous, Scary, sexy, and Dangerous. With that in mind, she threw a bunch of things and let her narrator, Nora, and sort them out. Nora, understandably, had some trouble with this, and the result is a thoroughly frustrating heroine who jumps to insane conclusions based on inane evidence one moment, and the next goes blithely along into obvious danger.



A rip-off of Twilight is the close similarities that I can think of. You have a regular average girl here, absent parents, a love affair with a dangerous supernatural boyfriend, a final showdown with a villain of his own kind. The mythology, while somewhat unusually paper thin. The characters are shallow and undeveloped.



The worst offense, Fitzpatrick, is how causal she wrote on sexual harassment scene between the main characters. Patch is seriously sexually harassing Nora in class, in front of the teacher and seemingly with the teacher’s encouragement.



That is just wrong.



And finally, why exactly Patch and Nora are in love? They know nothing about each other. Nora spends most of the book calling Patch creepy, fearing him, being roughly pinned by him to various walls in dark places or being at his knife’s point, and yet she is full of desire for him? It just makes no sense. As for Patch, I don’t know one thing about him or why he loves Nora.



My list can go on and on...



Hush Hush is a terrible book with lackluster annoying characters, ridiculous plot, and bad writing, but with an overabundance of creepiness. In a sad way, Twilight saga is a better book than this.



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I did not finish this book.



Here is the reason:



The writing is atrocious (to me, who knows, you might like it), the plot convoluted and barely detectable between the clusterfuck of prose. With an inexplicably small (borderline unreadable) font size and tons of footnotes about various mundane details in made-up high-fantasy history felt condescending and pretentious and so monotonous, not to mention like a crime against sentences. The sex scenes made me cringe (and I’ve read Jay Kristoff described as a male author capable of writing full, realistic female characters, but after the way Mia sexualized, I must beg to differ).



It is what happens, a man writes a book with a female protagonist. She would have absolutely no healthy friendships with women. Nonstop description of how beautiful her body part is, and the terrible smut that goes with it.



Kristoff was trying too hard to make this book grand. I had high hopes for this book, but unfortunately they did not meet.



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There are aspects of this book that I enjoyed very much, and there are also parts that I felt could have done better. It doesn't feel dated. The only thing that stood out was there was no cell phone or social media. The plot is your typical round-on-the-mill mystery thriller. A quick read for someone on the go.



So what went wrong?



The main character Kinsey Millhone did not feel like a real female to me. She is crass, which makes her seem uneducated and low-class. Attempts at presenting emotion from her were not believable; she simply came across as apathetic to the entire novel. And how she could solve any crime with the amount of alcohol she consumed in this book is beyond me.



The writing is bare-minimum stuff. It rehashed the plot from old pulp stories. I felt detached during the climactic finale, and the end of the book seemed overly abrupt. The ultimate explanation was plausible, but not particularly intriguing, and I would have been interested to read more about the repercussions of what ultimately went down.



In Summary



It alright novel filled with your typical round of the mill mystery thriller. An easy read for someone who just wants to waste some time.



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