So the other night I was trying to force myself to finish writing a chapter, but I was on the verge of headdesking at about 12:30, so I packed up then and went off to bed. I read some nice fluffy paranormal crap, sung myself into a subconscious lull, and then eventually fell into deep, drooling sleep.

You guessed it. This is a dream story.

Now, I rarely remember my dreams. But last night's was so freaking pungent that I can reel it all off right now without missing any details. Also, bear in mind that absolutely everything I'm about to tell you is one hundred per cent true. I never lie on Goodreads, because telling the truth is just so much more fun.

So it starts off with me in some kind of medieval town. I'm blonde, which is a change. The "camera angle" is third person, but I know that's me in the blue dress. For some reason, it occurs to me that my name is Bess, and for some reason I'm carrying a weapon, like a knife. I don't actually see the knife; I'm just aware of it.

So I step up in front of this shop, and suddenly the place looks more wild west. Some guy goes to attack me, but I totally ninja him and then leap down off the verandah, into a waiting crowd. They all part and then the guy I supposedly killed stands up again and yells, "You're a Pagan!"

Then I yell, in my own voice (and accent), "Don't come after me! These children [points to a group of forlorn children in front of me, all wearing blue] will get you! There are more over there, in that crowd!"

Then I run away, there's all this rushing, and then for some reason I'm suddenly running along this farm track, like a muddy road. The viewpoint's in full first person now. Think Bioshock. The atmosphere is sort of chalky and dark, something like Sleepy Hollow, and I'm running and running, but it's dream running, so I'm not really getting anywhere. You know dream running; you need to move, and there's something really fucking horrible chasing you, but for the life of you you can't make your legs move any faster than they would if they were coated in tar.

So I'm dream running, and then suddenly the word, "Samhain*" pops into my head and then I think, "Wait a minute! My name is Samhain!"

No, I don't even bother to question this. I keep trying to run, and when I look behind me, I see a fork in the road, and men in American civil war uniforms on horses, parting down the fork in the road. I keep trying to dream run, but it's pretty fucking useless, because one of the guys catches up. I dart off the road, into a fir tree, but I'm terrible at hiding and I get caught. The guy yells, "Samhain!" and then an old guy comes riding down the road on this tiny little horse and carriage, from the opposite direction, and starts shooting me with what I imagine was a BB gun. He has the creepiest expression on his face, I'm flinching, because I think I'm going to get hit, but somehow I don't.

Yeah.

A second later I'm back in some town square, and I'm wearing a bright orange bonnet that's too tight. It's made of thick, glossy paper, and it crosses my mind to be careful that the edge of it doesn't slit my throat. Why am I so paranoid? I'm not restrained, but I don't make a run for it. Everyone's chanting "Samhain! Samhain!" and then I do the creepiest thing I have ever done in a dream, ever.

I laugh. But it's this really loud Joker laugh, except ten times crazier, and my voice is all masculine. I'm cackling, basically, as they lead me to this huge sandstone building that looks like the Volturi clock tower from the New Moon movie (yeah, I saw it. Castrate me). I'm still screaming with manic laughter as they take me down all these torchlit flights of stairs and I start getting pretty fucking scared, because I see all these shadows flitting around and little wispy lights and shit, and then I get locked in this cell, and we're back to medieval times with this one. I bang on the door, yelling in a girly voice again, apparently trying to laugh it off as I say, "Come on, man! This is like false imprisonment!"

So the door opens and the guy says something that I can't remember, then he randomly falls down the stairs. When he hits the bottom step, he's miraculously changed into a woman with long, braided hair, and this crazy look of astonishment. I'm apparently unfazed by watching someone die, and I step over him/her, and make my way back up all the winding twisty staircases. Yeah, the shadows and creepy things are back, and I'm pretty fucking freaked out by the time I reach this polished ballroom, that looks like it has laminate flooring, and big windows. I walk past it, up a flight of stairs that look like the moving staircases in the Harry Potter movies, and on to this loft area that has windows that look on to a huge abyss with floating platforms hanging over it. The windows have blue velvet curtains, and no glass. They're sandstone. Ever been to the Wallace Monument? That's what the windows are like. Except at the Wallace Monument, they don't have curtains. Whatever.

To my left are two people sitting on a bench. There's a smirking woman wearing modern clothes and a big leather handbag, and a man, but he's blurry. The woman stands up and stalks past me, and the man stays where he is. In front of the window nearest to me is a man in grey/brown clothes, reaching out to two women who sit on the nearest floating platform. One is this really, really pale little girl, with a chubby kind of face and scraped back white hair, and the other is an older woman who reminds me of Vittoria from Angels and Demons. I walk up to them and suddenly the curtain starts moving by itself, and it gets pulled out into the abyss by what I can only imagine is some kind of ghost, and then pale girl starts shrieking and her fingers go like claws and she clamps her hand over Vittoria-look-a-like's face. Vittoria screams silently, and then I approach, and the man says something, and the girl slumps forward, pouting her lips and crying a little. Vittoria seems suddenly fine, and we all crouch over the pale girl, trying to make her feel better.

Then I wake up. And when I do, "You Are My Sunshine" is playing on a loop in my head. I'm actually humming it.

Look, you can't make that shit up. And that statement is why Becca Fitzpatrick fascinates me: because Hush, Hush makes less sense than my dream, yet somehow, she managed to conjure it all up with her naked little mind.

Well, not naked. It hardly takes a YA aficionado to notice the glaringly obvious Twilight catch-and-releases. But look at my dream, then look at Hush, Hush. Okay, so my name was Samhain. Beck's hero's name is Patch. So I got locked in a tower, presumably for being a Pagan. Nora goes all Cagney-and-Lacey, and goes undercover to stalk her tormenter at his workplace. Her costume was in a 7-Eleven bag, for fuck's sake! This stuff is totally pumped up, man! How much weed did Becks smoke before she wrote this shit? Seriously!

Look, pretty much everything that needs to be said about Nora already has been. My flash-in-the-pan Bess was more badass than her, and she had a bunch of children watching her back. Honestly? Nora is so fucking stupid, I'm surprised she's even been allowed to live. I'm amazed her mother hasn't already taken a chainsaw to her. She's that frakkin' dense. I've been hard-pressed to find a protagonist that's as completely insufferable as her, and I've read Halo.

Yes. What does that say? It says that I have a pretty high shit threshold, and yet Hush, Hush managed to piss me off enough to warrant this review. Yuh-huh.

Now, on to my next slab of beef: Edward Patch.

Not too long ago, my sister and I were exiting the supermarket, when some old dude reached out and slapped her ass. I screamed a bunch of swear words at him (I was about fourteen at the time) and hauled her away. She felt violated, and I was so angry I thought my jugular was going to pop.

Now, Patch is exactly the kind of guy who would do that. He'd pinch your ass when you weren't looking. He'd rub himself up against you on the subway. He'd bang you up against you own kitchen cabinets and dry-hump you when you barely knew him. He'd pin you down on a bed, tell you he wants nothing more than to kill you, then kiss you.

In short: Patch is a fucking lech, and a chauvinistic prick. He's disgusting. He's a rapist in the making* He is a rapist. He has absolutely no loving feelings for the protagonist; he simply wants to bone her. Probably to death.

*"in the making" was a stupid thing for me to say. Patch is not "in the making". He is made. He is a rapist, and though you've probably already read this post through a hundreds of links to it all over Goodreads, I'm going to relink it here just to catch the stragglers who didn't give it a glance.

Look, it's all been said. But this is YA rape culture at it's very worst. This is dressing up sexual harassment as love, then shoving it down the throats of young teens. A dangerous game, no?

Is simply putting up with sexual harassment in the classroom really something we want to teach today's teen population? Male or female? What begins in the classroom moves to the workplace, leisure time and eventually, more frighteningly, the home. Patch and Nora's relationship is built around her being terrifed of him, while he fantasizes about killing her. He outright TELLS her that he wants to kill her. On every level, this relationship is heinously unhealthy and extremely dangerous, and nothing anyone should ever aspire to. I see polls all over Goodreads where Patch is rated as the best hero, hottest love interest, best angel. Are you fucking serious? Really?

It is sexual harrassment and intimidation, sexual objectification, powerful misogyny and a clear prelude to rape.

If a lover, partner or spouse threatens your life, terrorizes you, humiliates you, belittles you, touches you when you do not wish to be touched, makes lewd/unwanted comments about your body, chases you around your car when you just want to go home, then that person is an immediate danger to you.

Or--no. Forget all those things, because it's as simple as this: If you say no, and a partner or spouse refuses to accept that, THEN THAT PERSON IS AN IMMEDIATE DANGER TO YOU.

Please. Don't EVER put up with behaviour like this. And don't EVER praise Patch as a character for displaying blatant traits of a psychopathic serial rapist/killer. Don't come here and try to convince me that Patch is perfect, a sexy bad boy, because I don't want to fucking hear it. I'm not interested in whatever praise anyone has for this horrifying rape fantasy.

Whenever I open this book and try desperately to see what everyone finds sexy, all I can think about is the man who grabbed at my sister, or the man who tried to dry-hump me at a concert while the people with him laughed, or the men who hang out of their car windows and honk at me when I'm walking down the street, panting about my body.

Women, do you think this is the way you deserve to be treated? I sincerely hope not.



Moving on!

Another area in which many authors fall down in: portrayal of school. Oh, we've had some wacky ones, like Lauren Kate's reform school shadow puppets and the perverted teachers of Forks High. But taking blood pressure in sex ed? Asking someone what they look for in a potential mate? Didn't Fitzpatrick ever go to high school? This is not what is taught in a biology lab - actually, it's not taught at school, period. Talking about what makes you horny is not appropriate subject matter for a classroom full of students looking to pass biology with a serious grade.

Talking about being horny is for locker rooms, children.

The main problem I have with the sex ed class in Hush, Hush is that a) sex ed is not taught in biology, but rather health class and b) the sex ed these kids receive is based around finding a mate, and sex is assumed to be solely for the purpose of reproduction. This is very ethically wrong, and here's why: GAY PEOPLE. Now, I have a serious problem with the fact that homosexual sex was NEVER discussed in either of my high schools, but this is a fictional world! In fiction, we can right the wrongs of society, if we so wish! We need not make them fucking worse when said fiction book is not based around a broken society! Oh my GOD!

Look, this is common practice today. People like to assume heterosexuality as a word of God because it makes it easier to fit everyone into the right little box. For instance:

Men, you go over here, and we'll call you masculine and expect you to pump iron and show no emotion or intelligence or hobbies outside fixing engines and mud sports, and sleep with everything and trash talk, because if you don't, you're not a man, and your penis is small. And in our thoroughly shallow and materialistic western world, we like to call your theoretically small penis degrading names and make you feel like you'll never, ever be good enough and must inject yourself so full of steroids that your heart threatens to give out every time you climb the stairs. If you do trash talk like you're supposed to and treat sex like it means nothing, you'll find yourself saddled with nicknames (invented mostly by females) like "jackass" or "man-whore" or, even worse, you'll be praised for it while these names are thrown at you from BEHIND. If you happen to be attracted to other males you'll be expected to look, talk and act in a non-traditionally-masculine way, and if you play sports or want to join the army or have male friends people will make an "oh, that's icky" face and expect you not to change in the locker rooms because of course, being a gay male means that your libido is completely OUT OF CONTROL and you want to nail every guy you lay eyes on, an attitude that stems from an age-old belief that homosexuality is some kind of "alternate" sexuality or a kink that is only practiced to sate deviant sexual desires, and not a trait wired into some people that is natural and undebatable and that should not be stigmatized because it is a sexuality like heterosexuality and no one debates heterosexuality, because as much as we'd like to think we're so liberal, we aren't. We are fucked in the head.

Women, you go over here, and we'll call you feminine and expect you to cry all the time and wear your hair long and cover yourself in white lace up to your neck, because if you express any kind of sexuality or promiscuity, we'll call you a WHORE or a SLUT or a SLAG and you might as well tattoo these names to yourself, because in high school, like in the middle ages, all a girl has is her reputation, regardless of whether or not it's true. Due to our right-wing society in which the only thing anyone cares about is a woman's vagina and how loose it is (myth) and of course intelligence or personality or beauty (inner or outer) is throwaway, since we've been conditioned by teen shows such as The OC or Gossip Girl or 90210 to only give a shit what someone does in their bed, even though that's their business and lucky for us in the north, the Canadian government agrees. If you wear revealing clothes you'll be slammed with the S, W and other S word, regardless of what it is that you do in your bedroom, because society is wired to zero in on a woman who attempts to break from the puritan box and express herself as female, and due to damaging purity myth indoctrination and the ancient belief of women as sexual deviants and "polluters", see Eve or Lilith, we are expected to assume that a woman who wears little wishes only to attract animal sexual attention from males - because no one ever considers lesbianism as an actual sexuality, just a smutty party game by sexy dangerous girls, RE: stoned deviants with no control, not women who just happen to be attracted to other women and may date and marry and build beautiful, healthy families, and deserve to without being stigmatized and accused of setting up a life based around sex and drugs and frivolity and being told that they are literally not fit to be parents because being lesbians (or gay men) of COURSE means that any child in their care will shrivel up and DIE immediately.

Basically, hand me that sledgehammer, and watch me beat the gender/sexuality box to death while screaming gratuitous insults.


...


Where the fuck was I?


I could go into Vee, but frankly I'd rather poke needles through my tongue than spend any time evaluating this worthless piece of stereotypical trash known as Nora's friend. Of course, being fat, Vee is the butt of all jokes, and Nora is constantly commenting on her weight, so maybe some slack should be cut. Not much, though. Vee could have gained my sympathy simply for the way Nora treats her, but I can't emotionally invest myself in someone so stupid, vapid, pointless, ridiculous and downright irritating as Vee Sky.

So no. Go die, Vee. Or, no. Don't die. I'd rather you lived to feel the burn of shame, because you're a shitty friend who enables rapists to treat your friend like shit. You tell Nora that Patch is sexy, that she should go for him, that she should STOP SAYING NO BECAUSE PATCH IS HOT.

Vee, I hate you. I hate you so much, because you are nothing but lousy-friend trash who would probably defend Patch's honor if Nora was found cut up in a dustbin behind his house, because he couldn't possibly have done it; he's too hot!

This book is also dreadfully written. I mean, really. Just because this is YA, doesn't mean it has to be stuffed full up purple prose, fucked-up metaphors, stupid dialogue, pointless descriptions and cheesy fight scenes. Honestly? A chimpanzee could have done a better job on this book's prose. An editor would have been a good help, too. It would have been nice to have avoided laundry-list character descriptions and "eyes that don't play by the rules".

What the fuck?

To conclude: I'll never Be Nice when it comes to your work, Becca. I just can't. A book that perpetuates rape culture and inflicts characters like Vee on the world of literature does not deserve my compassion. This is a great big steaming turd, end of. I'd rather eat all of my shoes than put myself through this torture again.

Basically? Fuck. You. Book.

The silver lining? Mine's paperback. Got it at Tesco cheapitty-cheap.

Booyah!




And now...

BONUS TIME!

Haw, yeah!




Why?

'Cause I can. That's why.




*Samhain is a Pagan harvest celebration that takes place on October 31st. Animal sacrifices are offered to gods and evil spirits are warded off by participants wearing frightening costumes and making jack-o-lanterns. It draws some elements from the Festival of the Dead, similar to the Day of the Dead, which is celebrated in Mexico. Basically, it's old-time halloween.