Pub. Date: January 23, 2013
Publisher: Green Darner Press
278 pages
Paperback/ebook
Based on the synopsis, I was expecting a Princess
Diaries-esque story of a girl finding out that she is royalty, with a darker twist.
But, Hush is more of a Princess
Anastasia murder story than Princess Mia’s rise to fame.
As far as Blakeley Henry knows there was nothing special
about her adoption. British journalism student Max Ryder discovers otherwise.
The daughter of a Tamuran Princess and a servant, Blakeley’s existence was kept
a secret to avoid a major scandal. When the entire Tamuran Royal Family is
killed in what we quickly learn was no accident, Blakeley is the only hope for
the family to retain its throne. If Max can’t prove Blakeley’s true identity,
convince her to claim her royal heritage, and keep her safe, then the Royal
Family’s killers will reign.
I had quite a few issues with this novel. Stylistically my
biggest issue was with the number of speakers. Some speakers narrated a single
chapter, others multiple, but the overall effect was that the story came off as
disjointed and inconsistent. I never felt I had a grasp or connection to any of
the characters because we were jumped between speakers, continents and time
periods every few pages. I also found the balance of the story to be somewhat
uneven. It took a long time to get to the meat of the story. We
are given all
of this information about the characters/places/times, but we don’t get into the
story and the action until more than halfway through. Once you got to the action,
instead of allowing the reader to experience the story first hand, we were
constantly told what was going to happen. The old ‘show, don’t tell’ writing
lesson, for me, needed to be used more. The balance in terms of how much
treatment major vs. smaller events received, was also out off. Some of the
small details had a large amount of time spent on them, whereas some of the
major – and I mean major – events in the story were rushed, or completely
glossed over.
Story-wise, I found the idea that an unknown teenage boy
would be given the responsibility of investigating a potentially huge political
figure’s paternity to be completely unbelievable. Entirely unrelated, but even
more unbelievable, was the prevalence of slut talk. Blakeley and her friends
consistently called each other sluts as what can only be described as a term of
endearment. The fact that the girls were described as mature and smart was
completely debased by such immature and gross talk. The slut calling just plain
bothered me and it completely affected my ability to relate to, and connect
with, the characters.
The concept of the novel put a new spin on a Princess/Cinderella
story. But, I personally felt the
novel needed some major editing. With fewer speakers, and more time devoted to
major story events, the reader may have a chance to actually feel a connection
with the characters. There’s no fix for slut talk, It just straight up had to
go.
Rating 3/10
** I received a copy of the novel from the publisher to read
and honestly review. I was in no way compensated.
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