Love the supernatural but sick of wizards, vampires, and werewolves galore? Then fasten your seatbelt because angels—particularly bad-to-the-bone fallen angels—are ready to step into the spotlight. For your own safety, we don't advise you try to stop them.

Becca Fitzpatrick's Hush, Hush rode in on the enormous young adult fantasy lit wave of the early 2000s, adding to the frenzy for all things supernatural with its tale of angels so fallible they fall from heaven, their half-bred evil spawn the Nephilim, and the unsuspecting humans caught up in it all. Add a steamy love story between narrator Nora and bad boy Patch, and it's no wonder the book has been praised as a "gripping chiller" and "exhilarating read" (source).

Published in 2009, Hush, Hush is the first of a four-book saga. This isn't your grandma's epic angel story, though—none of the angels in this book belong on the top of a Christmas tree. Instead, these creatures are powerful, devious, immortal, and dedicated to meddling in human lives. Poor Nora is just a reserved teen with a recently murdered dad and absentee mom who finds herself caught up in some very ugly, and very supernatural, business. It takes coming of age drama to a whole new level, to say the least.

Ready for a book that is actually as melodramatic as being a teen can feel like? Read on. The slew of accolades the book's received suggest you won't be disappointed (source).

Ah, love and death—we're going to go out on a limb and say that these are the two most pervasive subjects in literature. Go ahead and think of any famous novel, and we'll bet you an ice cream sundae with a cherry on top and extra sprinkles that love and/or death factor in.

When you put the two together in the kind of forbidden, dangerous love featured in Hush, Hush, things only get more interesting. The allure of the forbidden is as old as the apple in the Garden of Eden, but when love and death combine in the form of a supernatural potential romantic mate, acting on temptation only seems more taboo, and therefore extra appealing to the characters and to us as readers.

The allure of dangerous love is why we continue to be intrigued by stories like Antony and Cleopatra's and Romeo and Juliet's, and it's why we see so many variations of the dangerous/forbidden love plotline. Hush, Hush takes its place in this literary vein, giving us another chance to explore our human fascination with love, death, and the perilous coupling of the two.