Crescendo

Crescendo is a young adult paranormal romance by the American writer Becca Fitzpatrick, published in 2010 and the second book of the Hush, Hush series.

The novel's complications are emotional before they are supernatural: Patch will not say what Nora wants to hear, her mother's long silence about Nora's father has to be confronted, and the investigation into how he died turns up the phrase that gives the story its mystery, involving a figure the characters have been taught to fear. The answer, when it arrives, changes what Nora believes her mother has been protecting her from, which is how the series keeps a romance and a mystery running at the same time. Fitzpatrick writes the school and the household as carefully as the fallen angels, so the scenes where nothing supernatural happens carry the same tension as the ones where something does, and Nora's decisions are usually the reason the plot moves. The book spent ten weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and was named one of the Young Adult Library Services Association's top ten titles for 2011, and the series continued with a third novel.