I haven’t gone to much trouble to hide my disdain for the YA-trainwreck that is the Hush Hush-series. So me giving Silence two and a half stars is A BIG DEAL!

Maybe I should start off by saying that I did not purchase and read these books because I’m a masochist, but because they were given to me as a birthday gift some years ago. After hating part 1 but still having the next 2 books lying around, I was hoping for improvement. Crescendo offered none, but Silence did. Hallelujah! 

The third part in my least favorite series started off remarkably strong with a scene between Patch and Hank that had me hoping for the best. Maybe I could end up enjoying this one after all! Sometimes it takes a series a while to get into the groove, ya know? The first few chapters had an interesting premise, with Nora escaping from her kidnapping without any memories of Patch. Fresh slate, yeah!

Even though I still hate Nora’s voice as a main character and narrator, the plot seemed much more solid than in parts 1 and 2. And I very much enjoyed the lack of appearances by ‘best friend’ Vee, whom I hate as much as Nora if not more (yeah, probably more). 

After the first promising chapters though, I lost interest pretty quickly. A lot of the occurences seemed random and I didn’t feel the story was going anywhere. Then Scott reappears and … yawn. I got so bored with this book that I actually put it back on the bookshelf only half-read.

It wasn’t until about a 100 days later (thanks, Goodreads, for keeping count :p) that I picked it up again. And something MAGICAL happened! The second half of the book did not make me want to pull my hair out and bang my head against the wall, yay!

Even more remarkable: I ended up rather enjoying this second half. Patch and Nora were far less annoying in their “second romance” and I liked (yes, LIKED!) the storyline with Hank as the super villain. The end was quite good as well – almost made me want to give it 3 stars holy crap what is happening to me! 

So okay okay, I’ll read the fourth book too and be done with this series. There’s more room for improvement but at least now I know Becca Fitzpatrick is capable of improvement! (That sounds really mean and I’m sorry but Patch and Nora are truly my least favorite characters in existence).

On to Finale! (someday, that is)