Hush, Hush by Becca Fitzpatrick

A sacred oath, a fallen angel, a forbidden love

When Nora and Patch are forced together as lab partners, Nora would rather fall to her death than put up with his elusive answers to her questions, his teasing, and his infuriatingly handsome face and hypnotizing eyes. It seems Patch was put on earth just to drive her crazy.

But before long, Nora’s defenses start to break down as her curiosity about Patch heats up. Why does he always seem to be wherever she is and know exactly what she’s thinking? How does he know what to say to both attract and repulse her? And what is up with those V-shaped scars on his chiseled back?

As their connection grows stronger, Nora’s own life becomes increasingly fragile. Nora needs to decide: Is Patch the one who wants to do her harm or the one who will keep her safe? Has she fallen for one of the fallen?

Becca Fitzpatrick’s New York Times bestselling debut is a page-turning leap into the unknown world of fallen angels. Do you have someone to catch you?

Hush, Hush (Hush, Hush, book one) by Becca Fitzpatrick 

Start date: December 15, 2014

End date: December 16, 2014

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

I have a confession to make, beautiful internet people. I'm a sucker for fallen angels. Any time I see a novel, short story, movie, or whatever about fallen angels, I have to read/watch it. If the surges in popularity of movies and books about vampires, werewolves, and zombies are indicative of anything it's that I'm not alone in my obsession with certain paranormal creatures. Some people can't turn down a book about magicians, I can't turn down a book about angels—especially fallen angels. If I knew the reason, I probably wouldn't be blabbing about it to the whole wide world but I don't. And I'll live in that ignorance for a while, okay? 

With that said, I’m a little biased towards this book. I imagine it got the score that it did partly because of its content and partly because of the story. It kept me hooked, so hooked that I stayed up until 2:30 AM reading it and broke my tradition of only reading before bed in order to finish it earlier this afternoon when I had some free time. I was itching to find out what happened next to our heroine, Nora. This was such a guilty pleasure read that kept me turning pages and I’m not ashamed to admit that. You better believe the next book in the series is at the top of my to-be-read list.

As aforementioned, the protagonist of this novel is Nora Grey, a sophomore (more about that later) at Coldwater High School (CHS) in Coldwater, Maine.

In case you were wondering, Coldwater is not a real town. I had to double check because the voice in the back of my head kept nagging about it. Man, what is it about paranormal books being set in nonexistence, shitty, little towns in frigid, northern states? It’s as if supernatural creatures couldn’t live somewhere real, warm, and sunny.

Enough about the state of setting in most paranormal novels and back to Nora. She’s a tightly-wound overachiever who focuses on her schoolwork more often than anything else. She works for the high school’s online magazine (I shuddered every time they said “EZine”), visits the school psychologist every week, and has some eclectic interests we only learn about through Patch (more on him later as well) but never see her actually participating in. Nora’s father is dead—murdered in a dark alley or something—and her mother is an estate auctioner who travels for work one week out of each month, leaving Nora home alone often. Her mother employs a German woman named Dorothea seemingly to make meals for Nora when she isn’t home. Together they live in an old farmhouse, which happens to be far away on the outskirts of town, where their neighbors are a mile away.

At the start of the novel, Nora’s biology teacher who doubles as the school’s gym teacher has just announced that he will be switching the seating chart to which Nora’s best friend and complete opposite, Vee, replies, “It’s April. As in, it’s almost the end of the year. You can’t pull this stuff now” (Fitzpatrick 10). The new seating chart puts Nora at the same desk as the quiet transfer student who she feels both repulsed and strangely attracted to, Patch. Patch seems to know everything about Nora down to the colleges she’s planning on applying to but Nora can’t get a single thing out of him except his name and phone number.

The college thing threw me for a loop. For most of the novel, I thought Nora and Vee were seniors. They acted like they were going through the motions of high school like I would expect seniors to act in the couple of months before graduation when most of their teachers had nothing else to teach them and nothing else for them to do. Nora was worried about which college she would end up going to—not which college she would apply to or which one she would like attending more. Nora and Vee drove their own cars like they’d always been driving. The fact they were taking biology bugged me because I knew as a senior it was unlikely (but possible) to be taking a lower level science class. But in that class, they were getting an advanced lesson on human sexuality so I believed it was possibly some advanced placement or college level course that no one mentioned. It wasn’t until the end when Nora mentioned being a sophomore that I had to go back and make sure I hadn’t misread anything. Nobody seemed to act their age.

There are many Nancy Drew-like instances I was tickled by, such as when Nora broke into the student records room in order to investigate Patch’s file and when Vee dressed in Nora’s sweater as she left Victoria’s Secret to catch a stalker following Nora. It helped move the story along and kept the pace going strong. I wasn’t at all interested in the secondary plot with Elliot and Kjirsten because it was underdeveloped and abandoned a little more than halfway through the novel only to be reconvened at the ending to wrap things up. I’ll reiterate that this was a guilty pleasure of mine and should probably be taken as such.