Crescendo by Becca Fitzpatrick

Overall:

*** MAY contain spoilers from Hush, Hush ***

Nora Grey should have known her life was far from perfect. Even though her boyfriend , Patch, also happens to be her literal guardian angel (who, despite the title, is far from angelic), things are not looking up. First there is summer school and facing the nightmare of her enemy Marcie Millar as her lab partner. Then Patch starts to pull away with no explanations. And finally, she is having nightmares and visions about her father’s murder.


As Nora chooses to ignore her better instincts and delves deeper into the mystery of her father’s death, she also begins to question whether her Nephilim bloodline had something to do with it, which casts more doubt on her relationship (or lackthereof) with Patch. Does he know more than he lets on Why does he always seem to be standing in front of the answers she is looking for? And if he really is her guardian angel, why is her life always in danger?

I just finished my first ARC Crescendo, the sequel to Hush, Hush which is one of my favourite books ever and let me tell you Crescendo didn’t disappoint! After just finishing it, I will now write my review at 2:10 am… yeah, that’s how good it was! I had to run out of my room to get my laptop so I could adequately express my overwhelming satisfaction of Crescendo. Now, I should stop babbling and start typing my actual review.

As always I have to give my massive props to cover artist James Porto… he is just fantabulous! I think I like this cover more than I like the Hush, Hush cover which is hard to imagine but they are both so gorgeous!

It will always thoroughly amaze me how realistically Becca writes her characters! I mean seriously! I can completely picture Nora, a smart, school oriented chick with a feisty side. (Which I can totally relate to being a bit of a nerd myself!) I love her contrast with Patch, dark, sexy, brooding… I love the opposites attract notion in their relationship! In Crescendo a new character comes into play, one which I found oddly fascinating, Scott Parnell. He and Nora were friends back in the day, and his family moved back to Coldwater, once again we have a strong contrast between him and Nora, dark, mysterious, he hangs out at Z’s Pool Hall (I step below Bo’s I’ll tell you that!) and you have no idea what to make of him ‘til the very last page! Vee was awesome as usual, she’s always good for lightening the mood… The rest of the lovable cast are back in as well, Rixon, Detective Basso (who is slowly crawling up to become one of my favs!), Marcie Millar, etc.

Becca’s plotwork and writing are phenomenal! It’s impossible to start reading and know where it ends, I was completely off every time I said “Oh, well obviously this is what’s going to happen!” All the sudden the plot would veer in a completely different direction! But, with Becca’s beautiful writing style it works and I ate it up! I don’t want to explain too much about the plot, because I could give stuff away and not know it. I will definitely be counting down the days until the next book! (At least, I REALLY hope there is one seeing as we were left with a massive cliffhanger!)

Hope you guys are having an awesome Fantasyfest, as this is my kickoff review and first book I’ll have checked off the challenge. But, I am very excited about everyone getting to read Crescendo, I don’t want to give it up! 10/19/10 baby!

Cover:

Characters:

Plot:
Writing:

xoxo,