Book review: Crescendo by Becca Fitzpatrick

The sequel to Hush, Hush, Crescendo follows the usually bad story of Nora Grey, who is like 1/16th Nephilim. Her boyfriend Patch is a fallen angel who wanted to sacrifice her to become human, but decided against it and convinced the archangels to give him back his guardian angel status. So now they’re in love. And that’s the premise of Hush, Hush in a nutshell.

When Crescendo opens, Patch reveals that it’s against the rules for guardian angels to have relationships with humans, and so Nora breaks up with Patch. For the rest of the book, a pattern is set up where Nora is mad at Patch, and then runs into him somewhere. Then by running into him, Nora decides to make the worst possible choices, almost all of them aimed at getting back at Patch. Which is sad, because as it comes out, mostly she’s attacking Patch because he’s trying to do his job as a guardian angel.

Having said that, Patch is a secretive bad boy type, and he can never answer a straight question. Nora is left to hunt for answers, but Nora is not the brightest character in YA. If there’s an easy way to get information, Nora will try to find the dumbest way possible, get caught, and STILL not understand what she’s found. If she comes to any conclusion, it will be the exact opposite of what’s really happening. So you’ve got a bad boy angel boyfriend with secrets, and a neurotic, slightly dim-witted girlfriend. With a combination like this, it’s easy to see where their relationship falls into a spiraling pattern of trust issues.

Crescendo also introduces a new bad boy, Scott, another Nephilim who Nora has a shared childhood with. Scott was a bully back then, and the things Nora remembers about him makes him out to be a self-centered brat. The teenage Scott isn’t much better, actually. Nora, however, begins to notice that Scott is possibly Nephilim, and she decides to investigate despite Patch’s warnings that Scott is dangerous. In fact, Patch’s concern is what drives her to use some really lousy plans in the course of her investigation.

Add to this backdrop that Nora is seeing her dad, who was shot and killed a few years before. She isn’t sure if this is a ghost, a Nephilim mind trick, or if her father is alive. But each time she sees him, he disappears around a corner. Nora also receives a message that the Black Hand killed her father, and some of the information she gets suggests that Patch may be the Black Hand. You’d think asking a direct question might be the best way of sorting out a complex issue, but in the Nora Grey school of amateur sleuthing, the best way takes a tortured, painful route. And it involves stealing a vehicle.

These various strands are interesting, but the way the story gets to these points is less a graceful jaunt through a world, but a bumbling stumble taking the less well lit back route. Nora’s leaps of logic often sound stupid the moment she’s said them, so for the first two-thirds of the book it’s safe to assume that anything Nora “knows” is probably wrong because she’s the lousiest detective ever. But it is kind of fun watching her stumble, and some her worst decisions are entertaining, to say the least.

Patch still doesn’t do much for me as a romantic lead, and the few romantic scenes in this book were just as flat for me as they were in the first book. He is an interesting character, and I like finding out what the simpler real story is near the end of the book. But I’m not feeling his hawtness just yet. He’s like a creepy boyfriend type that makes mothers nervous, so it’s no wonder Nora’s mom initially endorses Scott as a possible replacement. (Which was creepy as hell, and I had to put the book down a while after that chapter. But once she realizes Scott is scum, Nora’s mom backs off her endorsement FAST, so that helped ratchet down the WTF factor.)

Crescendo ends on a big cliffhanger, but it’s okay, as I have the rest of the series on my shelf already. Despite the character’s head-scratchingly bad decision making, I rather like the story and the world-building. The romance aspect doesn’t work for me, but as it’s a smaller part of the larger plot, it’s easy to forgive.

Also, there’s no school of writing that says the character always has to be the smart guy, or that a story always has to be about making the best choices. But some of the ideas that Nora and her friend Vee come up with…wow, they’re bad. Not like bad writing. Like cringing and thinking, this is stupid and it will never work. But I gotta give kudos to the writer, because these plans don’t work, and she explores a way out of these corners Nora keeps getting herself trapped in.

So, it’s a fun, fluffy read which starts out about as creepy as the first, circles around in a holding pattern of mirrored scenes with Patch and Nora fighting, and then gets down to clearing up why Nora was totally, completely, utterly wrong. Again.

There’s still two books left in the series, but even if this pattern holds, I can’t say I mind. Nora does dumb things, but I still wonder just how dumb her next plan can possibly be, and what she will do when the whole thing blows up in her face.

I give Crescendo 4 stars and recommend it to fans of paranormal YA with angels, demons, and nephilim. It’s a summer reading kind of book, the kind of thing you take on vacation when you don’t want to think too hard. It’s like a mystery where all the clues are given to you, but the main character pulls you away from the conclusions with her own red herring leaps of logic. Can you sort out the real story before the ending? I didn’t, but then I wasn’t trying. I was just turning pages under the morbid curiosity to see what Nora would bungle her way through next.