Crescendo

What's inside (8 sections)

1. Patch pulls away
2. Scott Parnell is back
3. Marcie, Hank and the family shock
4. The Black Hand and her father's death
5. Dreams, rules and the final night
6. What holds and what strains
7. Key takeaways
8. FAQ

I finished Hush, Hush late on a rainy weekend and ordered the sequel the same night because the ending felt unfinished in a way that bugged me. Patch had chosen Nora, the fallen angel rules were still hanging over them, and her father's death still did not sit right. Crescendo was the book I wanted next. It is the second volume in the Hush, Hush saga by Becca Fitzpatrick, published October 19, 2010 by Simon and Schuster Books for Young Readers as a 432 page hardcover. It picks up Nora Grey's story in Coldwater, Maine, a few months after she survived Chauncey, with Patch now assigned as her guardian angel and their romance already under strain.

That strain is the engine for most of the book. On paper Nora and Patch are together. In practice Patch is cold, secretive, and gone at odd hours. He will not say he loves her. He deflects every direct question about his past and his work. Nora, who narrates in her plain practical voice, feels the gap widening and hates herself for caring so much about closing it. Anyone who has been nineteen and insecure in a lopsided relationship will recognize the pattern. She checks his behavior for clues. She replays short conversations. She asks Vee what she thinks, then ignores the advice.

Fitzpatrick leans into that discomfort rather than smoothing it over. This is not a happy sequel opening where the couple teams up against the world. It is a book about two people who survived something terrible and came out less sure of each other. Patch says the distance is for her protection. Nora hears rejection. Both of them keep secrets that would help if spoken aloud. The frustration builds fast, and for the first hundred pages it carries the story better than the supernatural plot does.

Patch pulls away

The rules set up at the end of book one still apply. Guardian angels are forbidden from romantic involvement with their charges. If Patch stays with Nora in that way, he risks being cast down for good. He knows it. She knows it in theory, but theory does little when she sees him pulling back in practice.

What makes it worse is Marcie Millar. Marcie was the school mean girl in Hush, Hush, rich, polished, and openly hostile to Nora. Now Patch seems to be spending time around her. He is seen with her. He defends her. He will not explain why. Nora's imagination does the rest, and Fitzpatrick lets the jealousy sit on the page without tidying it into something noble. Nora snoops. She follows. She confronts Patch and gets half answers.

There is a scene early on where Nora tries to force clarity by ending the guardian arrangement. She tells Patch she no longer wants him as her guardian angel. In the logic of the series, a human can reject that protection, and rejection has consequences. Patch accepts it on the surface, but neither of them treats it as final. It reads like a breakup fought through supernatural paperwork. She wants him to fight for her. He thinks stepping back keeps her alive. They talk past each other for chapters.

Patch also starts reaching her in dreams. The dream contact was Fitzpatrick's editor's idea, according to interviews, and it becomes a central device here. He visits Nora while she sleeps, sometimes tender, sometimes evasive. She wakes unsure what was real. At one point he tells her in a dream that he is now Marcie's guardian angel. Nora takes it as confirmation of her worst fears. Patch means it as duty, or punishment, or strategy. The book keeps his motives cloudy on purpose, which annoyed me in places, though I understood the choice. If we knew what Patch knew, the mystery would collapse.

I found this stretch believable as relationship writing even when it irritated me as plotting. Patch offering to fall for real, to go rogue and give up his wings in order to be with Nora without restriction, should feel romantic. Nora refuses because she does not want to be the reason he is destroyed. That refusal is one of her best moments. She wants a boyfriend, not a sacrifice she has to carry. It is also the rare moment where both characters state their positions clearly. Most of the time they circle.

Scott Parnell is back

Into that gap walks Scott Parnell. Scott is an old friend from Nora's childhood, back in Coldwater after years away, with a grin, a record, and a physical ease that sets Patch on edge immediately. Nora remembers building forts and riding bikes with him. Now he is tall, tattooed, working odd jobs, and clearly mixed up in something rough.

Fitzpatrick uses Scott well for about half the book. He gives Nora something Patch will not give her, which is attention without riddles. He teases her. He shows up. He listens when she talks about her father. He also sets off every alarm she owns. Her instincts say Nephilim, meaning the child of a fallen angel and a human, stronger than normal, tied into the same hidden world as Patch. Patch confirms it, though his confirmation comes late and grudgingly.

Scott's apartment, his friends, his cash work, all of it smells like trouble, and Nora knows it. She goes anyway because trouble that answers questions feels better than safety that does not. That decision drives several bad choices in a row. She rides with him. She lets him into her investigation. She kisses him once largely to provoke Patch, a scene that embarrassed me for her and felt true for exactly that reason. The two boys fight after, stupid and physical, and Nora sees how much of the rivalry is about possession rather than protection.

What saves Scott from being a simple wedge character is that he has his own stakes. He is Nephilim, which in this series means he can be used as a vessel, pressured by fallen angels, and watched by people who want to control that bloodline. He drinks too much. He lies when cornered. He also protects Nora at points when it costs him. His friendship with her feels older and easier than her romance with Patch, built on shared history instead of cosmic rules. When he is later shot and left for dead, the shock works because Fitzpatrick took the time to make him more than a plot device.

Vee's reaction to Scott helps too. Vee Sky, Nora's best friend, is loud, funny, loyal, and suspicious of every boy on principle by now. She likes Scott's charm and distrusts his timing. Her banter with him gives the middle chapters air. Without Vee cracking jokes and calling out nonsense, the jealousy loop between Nora and Patch would be airless.

Marcie, Hank and the family shock

Marcie Millar dominates the social plot, and this book gives her more weight than the first one did. She is still cruel to Nora in school hallways, still perfect hair and perfect dismissal. But Fitzpatrick starts peeling back why Marcie hates Nora so much, and the answer is uglier than teenage rivalry.

Marcie tells Nora that Nora's mother has been having an affair with Marcie's father, Hank Millar, for eleven years. Eleven years. That number lands hard because it reframes everything. This is not a recent betrayal or a rumor. In Marcie's telling, Nora's family broke hers long ago, and Nora's cluelessness about it reads as insult on top of injury. Nora does not believe it at first. Then she watches her mother dodge questions. She watches Hank's familiarity. She starts adding up absences and late nights and money that moved quietly.

Her mother, Blythe Grey, is drawn with tired realism. She works long hours, grieves her husband, tries to keep the house running, and hides plenty. Whether Marcie's version is fully accurate matters less to Nora than the fact that her mother will not give a straight denial. That silence does real damage. Nora already lost her father. Now her mother's past looks unstable. Home stops feeling like refuge.

Hank Millar himself is a cold presence, wealthy, controlled, used to getting answers. He watches Nora in ways that feel parental and threatening at once. The final pages make explicit what the book hints at for chapters, that Hank is Nora's biological father. He asks her near the end if she killed Chauncey, a question that only makes sense if he knows far more about Nephilim blood and fallen angels than a furniture store owner should. It is a strong hook into the next book, even if it arrives fast. Suddenly Nora's parentage, her bloodline value, and her father's murder all point in one direction.

I appreciated that Fitzpatrick let Marcie be right about something painful without turning her into a friend. Marcie remains prickly and hurtful. Her pain explains her, it does not excuse months of cruelty, and Nora does not forgive her on the spot. Their scenes have a stiff awful energy that felt honest. High school does not resolve with hugs because both girls had hard lives. Sometimes you just learn the other person's wound and keep your distance.

The Black Hand and her father's death

The mystery half of Crescendo centers on two linked questions. Who killed Nora's father that night he left for Portland and never came home. And who is the Black Hand.

The Black Hand arrives first as a name in an anonymous letter. Someone tells Nora that this figure, a kind of bogeyman in Nephilim circles, was behind her father's murder. The letter reads like bait, and Nora knows it might be bait, but she cannot ignore it. Her father's death was ruled one way, felt another way, and every official answer left gaps. She starts pulling at threads Patch told her to leave alone. She visits people who knew her dad. She asks about Portland. She compares stories. Each answer points a little more toward the hidden world of fallen angels and their Nephilim descendants.

This is where the book is strongest as a thriller. Fitzpatrick writes investigation scenes with good momentum. Nora sneaking a look at records. Nora asking a leading question and watching someone flinch. Nora realizing a detail she was told months ago now means something else. The danger rises in parallel. Someone breaks in. Someone follows her car. Someone shoots. The attacks are spaced well enough that I never felt safe for her, though a couple arrive so conveniently that they felt staged by the plot rather than by a person.

Patch's secrecy hurts most here. He knows pieces about the Black Hand and about Nora's father. He withholds them, saying she is safer not knowing, saying the archangels are watching, saying timing matters. From his side, the caution makes sense. Knowledge marks her. From her side, it looks like control. She is trying to solve her father's murder. The boy who claims to love her will not tell her what he knows about it. No wonder she turns to Scott, who will at least talk, even if half of what he says needs checking.

The Black Hand rumor also poisons her view of Patch. Rixon, a new boy who is dating Vee, tells Nora plainly that Patch is the Black Hand. Coming from someone inside Vee's circle, the claim carries weight. Nora wants to dismiss it. She cannot fully dismiss it because Patch's behavior with Marcie, his night absences, his dream evasions, all fit if you tilt your head. Fitzpatrick plays fair with the misdirection. The clues point to Patch if you want them to. They point elsewhere if you look longer. I guessed wrong about the identity on first pass, then felt the right answer had been visible for a while once it arrived.

Dreams, rules and the final night

The last third moves fast and piles revelations. Rixon, who seemed like comic relief as Vee's boyfriend, steps forward as the central threat. He is a fallen angel with his own plans, and his friendly surface cracks in a way I found genuinely chilling. He tells Nora he was behind much of what frightened her. He says he needs her as a sacrifice so he can take a human body. In the logic Fitzpatrick built across two books, fallen angels crave permanent human form, Nephilim bodies can be taken during certain times, and Nora's particular bloodline makes her especially useful. Rixon does not want to scare her. He wants to use her up.

The showdown is violent by YA standards of the time. Rixon shoots both Scott and Nora. Scott, who came despite every reason to run, takes a bullet meant in part for her. Nora is hurt and terrified and still thinking. Patch arrives, and the fight between fallen angels is brutal rather than elegant. No shining swords and speeches. Grappling, pain, choices with permanent cost. Patch stops Rixon, and Rixon is sent to Hell for his crimes, which closes the immediate danger but leaves the system intact. The angels above still police love. The Nephilim are still vulnerable. Winning one fight changes little about the world.

Several smaller payoffs land around that climax. Scott survives, barely, and then leaves town to stay clear of the police, who have questions about his jobs and associates that he cannot answer without exposing the supernatural. His goodbye with Nora is muted and kind. No big kiss, no promise. Just two kids who grew up together acknowledging they cannot keep each other safe right now. I liked that restraint. A lesser sequel would have forced a triangle choice with speeches. Fitzpatrick lets Scott exit with dignity.

Nora and Patch reunite, but the reunion is not presented as pure victory. She takes him back knowing he lied by omission for months. He takes her back knowing she fired him, kissed Scott, and chased a killer against orders. Their deal is clearer now. She will not accept silence as protection. He will have to speak even when speech puts them at risk. Whether that deal can hold under angel law is left open, which is honest. Love does not rewrite cosmic rules because two teenagers want it to.

Then comes the Hank scene. Hank, revealed as her biological father, asks if she killed Chauncey. The question implies knowledge of book one's climax that no outsider should have. It also implies a claim on her. Nora ends the book with more answers about Rixon and fewer about her own family than she started with. Fitzpatrick planned that disorientation. She has said in interviews that she rewrote this book from scratch after her editor rejected the first draft, and that the final twist came to her late. It reads that way, sudden and deliberate, a door kicking open to Silence.

What holds and what strains

What holds is momentum and emotional honesty about jealousy. Fitzpatrick understands how suspicion narrows a person's world. Nora checks phones in her head, rereads texts, watches doorways. The prose stays close to that tight worried attention. The Maine setting helps, fog, early dark, old houses that creak, a town small enough that you keep running into the people hurting you. The investigation into her father's death gives the middle chapters purpose even when the romance stalls. And Scott and Vee keep the human world alive when the angel talk turns abstract.

What strains is repetition. The cycle of Nora asking, Patch deflecting, Nora snooping, Patch scolding, repeats with small variations for much of the book. After the third loop I started skimming their fights. Nora hides things from Vee and her mother while demanding total honesty from Patch, a double standard the book barely notes. Marcie's sudden centrality sometimes feels engineered to keep the couple apart. And the Rixon reveal, though effective in the moment, leans on a villain who was barely sketched before he needed to carry the climax.

The gender dynamics deserve a plain note. Patch monitoring Nora, choosing what she can know, showing up uninvited, reads as protective inside the fantasy and controlling outside it. The book frames his restraint as love. Readers who found book one's surveillance troubling will find more to question here, especially when Patch uses Marcie to provoke jealousy and calls it strategy. Fitzpatrick does give Nora pushback lines and real anger, which helps. She fires him. She calls him out. She refuses his rogue offer. But the structure still rewards his secrecy with her forgiveness. If possessive heroes are a hard line for you, this sequel will test it harder than the first book did.

Who should read it. If you finished Hush, Hush for Nora's voice and the Coldwater mood and want the next piece of the bloodline puzzle, this delivers, with a faster last hundred pages than the first book managed. If you wanted the mythology explained cleanly, you may leave unsatisfied, since Crescendo adds questions about Hank, about Nephilim politics, about dream contact, without settling them. It is very much a middle book, evaluated less on its own arc than on how well it sets up Silence. On that measure it works. I closed it annoyed at Patch, worried about Scott, suspicious of Hank, and unwilling to stop. For a series built on wanting what is bad for you, that feels like the intended effect.

For readers new to the saga, start with Hush, Hush first. The emotional beats here assume you know who Chauncey was, why Patch owes Nora protection, and why Marcie's hatred has history. Fitzpatrick recaps lightly, but the weight comes from accumulation. Read in order, watch for the small tells around Rixon and Hank, and save judgment on Patch until the final night. The book does not resolve whether love excuses secrecy. It leaves that question open into the next volume, which is probably why so many of us kept going.

FAQ

When was Crescendo published?

Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers published it on October 19, 2010. The hardcover runs 432 pages and the ISBN is 9781416989431.

Is it part of a series?

Yes. It is book 2 in the Hush, Hush saga, after Hush, Hush and before Silence and Finale.

Who are the main characters?

Nora Grey and Patch Cipriano, plus Scott Parnell, Marcie Millar, Vee Sky, Rixon, and Hank Millar.