Title: Hush
Author: Dylan Farrow
Publisher: St. Martin’s Publishing Group
Genres: Young Adult, Fantasy
Length: 384 pages
My Rating: ★★★
3/5 stars
Summary:
“Seventeen-year-old Shae has led a seemingly quiet life, joking with her best friend Fiona, and chatting with Mads, the neighborhood boy who always knows how to make her smile. All while secretly keeping her fears at bay… Of the disease that took her brother’s life. Of how her dreams seem to bleed into reality around her. Of a group of justice seekers called the Bards who claim to use the magic of Telling to keep her community safe.
When her mother is murdered, she can no longer pretend.
Not knowing who to trust, Shae journeys to unlock the truth, instead finding a new enemy keen to destroy her, a brooding boy with dark secrets, and an untold power she never thought possible.”
Review:
Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Publishing for a copy of Hush in exchange for an honest review! Hush releases tomorrow if you’d like to pick up a copy. I enjoyed this, though I think I’d enjoy it more with a reread than my first time around. This book is filled with small details that don’t pull together until in hindsight, which is excellently done but can lead to some confusion for me. The concept of Bards was really cool, and the Blot is such a unique sickness – it felt so threatening and so new. I had a lot of questions about the Blot and how it came to be throughout the book. Though some parts felt a little unclear, I’d say most of those sections were quite strategic and tied together by the plot’s final revelations quite nicely. The way the author holds out until absolutely necessary to provide some key information threw me headfirst into the Shae’s fear of succumbing to madness, and it added a strong effect to those moments alternating between fear and clarity. If you’re a very empathetic reader, this book is a wild ride; however if you prefer to know secrets or guess where a book is headed before the main character knows, you might end up a little frustrated by Hush. What I truly appreciated is seeing the way a world can be rebuilt to focus on the power of words where once they existed freely for everyone, and how the Bards being the safe-keepers of language and writing influences the world at large.
On the shows of power –
- “Only the Bards can harness words safely, through their Tellings. Everyone in Montane knows that any fool can speak disaster into existence by uttering something forbidden”
The Tellings are how the Bards ultimately maintain power in Shae’s world. As is seen later, Tellings are powerful enough to change entire landscapes. As a reward for a good tithe, a town will be blessed with a Telling for rain, fertile crops, etc. If the tithe is unsatisfactory, the town will be punished and not receive a Telling for the coming year. This turns into a vicious cycle where the towns that struggle most continue to struggle, as they can’t keep up with the demands of the Bards without help. - “For every Bard in the ranks of High House, there are dozens more hopefuls who cannot withstand such power… Such occurrences are sadly more prevalent among the few women we have discovered in possession of the gift” The main character, Shae, seems about as in control as she could be given the nature of the magic and secrets surrounding her life. A Bards magic, when misused, seems to be an extended practice in gaslighting. It raises some interesting questions throughout the book that become very important to the plot, pitting women against women and making Shae work 5x harder to be taken seriously. That threat of madness, in part due to her magic and in part due to her gender, makes the book feel all the more intense.
- “If I want to exert my will over the castle’s, I need to lend my Telling permanency. My eyes fall on my needles and thread, discarded in the corner” The most important act of telling is its staying power. Writing is mostly outlawed throughout Shae’s world to prevent more permanently etched Tellings from taking hold. Words or impulses make for impermanent, esily changed Tellings. This ultimately brings about the heart of the matter: nothing in Shae’s world is really permanent. The Bards have established themselves as the only people responsible enough for writing, for keeping everyone safe. But they behave in shady ways and don’t lend themselves easily to being trusted, instead working through propoganda and militant control of the surrounding areas. A world without writing, with no permanence to be had, is an easily subjugated world. The hints at resistance are strong throughout Hush, and I can’t wait to see where the blossoming resistance to the powers that be leads in book 2.
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