Hush
An Irish Princess' Tale
Donna Jo Napoli
Reviewed by Jo Manning
I came across HUSH in a review in the Miami Herald, my local newspaper. It was recommended as one of the best of the current crop of Young Adult novels. (YA is for older children; nowadays the stories often carry mature sexual themes and can be surprisingly graphic.) As HUSH had not yet made it to my local public library, I looked for whatever else of Napoli’s was on the shelves to acquaint myself with her style, and I was blown away by her imagination.
BREATH was the first one I tackled. It’s a spin on the tale of THE PIED PIPER OF HAMELIN, but the Piper soon disappears and we are left with the tale of a boy named Salz who suffers from a malady that has a good chance of killing him as it killed a younger sister. It’s cystic fibrosis, but no one knew about cystic fibrosis in medieval Germany, only that children whose skin tasted salty were prone to lung congestion and died young of suffocation. It’s an unsentimental, often brutal tale but totally gripping: it sticks with the reader and the young, brave protagonist Salz is unforgettable. The brilliant turn on what might really have occurred in Hamelin is pure Napoli. (No spoilers here: Read it!)
BOUND, a Chinese retelling of the Cinderella tale, was next. Unusual and also gripping, with the requisite mean stepmother, but only one stepsister who’s more to be pitied than hated. There’s also a magical carp in lieu of the requisite fairy godmother. By the time I got to ZEL, (for Rapunzel), another fairy tale retold, with the witch holding the beautiful girl captive her very own mother, I was hooked on Napoli’s unique slant on the genre and her tough, unsentimental, writing style. This author takes no prisoners. The novels are not always easy to read, even for adults, because children often suffer undeserving fates.
The narrator of HUSH, the Irish princess Melkorka, is not entirely likable at first – the character is a challenge! -- but Napoli brings us to admire her bravery, spunk, and her growing ability to withstand great loss and still soldier on. There is no deus ex machina in this tale, alas; no Prince Charming will rescue this beautiful princess.
The story’s set in Ireland in the 900s, a land of scattered kingdoms and great wealth if one is at the top of the heap. For the rest of the population, farmers and slaves who provide the labor for the getting of this wealth for the very few, life is of necessity nasty, brutish, and short. Melkorka’s father is the local king – the area is called Downpatrick -- her mother the queen, she and her sister Brigid, princesses, her brother Nuada the prince and heir to the kingdom. Melkorka’s quite conscious of her exalted position in this society and has a good opinion of herself; she’s also blond and beautiful.
On a birthday trip to Dublin, a city controlled by Vikings and not altogether safe for the Irish, Prince Nuada is accidentally injured – badly – by an unknown Viking assailant. Melkorka blames herself because she was the one who’d insisted on visiting the city. Hurrying back to their kingdom, the family plots revenge against the most likely group of Vikings who might have injured and disfigured their prince. Their plan is tricky, foolhardy, and has the potential of backfiring badly, with deadly consequences for all, so the queen sends Melkorka and Brigid away to safety with the family of an underlord beholden to them. The girls are, unfortunately, sent by themselves, with no guard, and are soon taken captive by low-life Russian slavers patrolling the coastal waters. (That no one warned the girls of this menace along their shores is yet another example of the king and queen’s foolishness, beginning with that risky trip to Dublin.)
HUSH then becomes a story of survival, harsh and uncompromising, made even worse for the haughty Melkorka when her sister Brigid – a brave, clever child, a scene-stealing character who deserves a sequel of her own if any fictional character ever does – jumps overboard with an older Saxon boy captive and swims away, one hopes, to safety, somewhere off the forbidding coast of Scandinavia, home to many dangerous Viking tribes.
Melkorka’s only trump card is her silence. Warned by her mother before setting off with Brigid to mind her tongue, and cautioned by Brigid to hold it, Melkorka becomes selectively mute. She will not speak, not to the malevolent slavers, not to the other captives onboard ship. She does, however, soon learn compassion and how it feels to be a slave, something she, a princess who’d had many slaves at her beck and call, had never felt before. This awareness finally makes her human and the reader can warm to her. She becomes a leader of the group, along with a tough, worldly-wise Irish woman who seems to know a great deal about their captors.
Her silence is empowering. It, and the stork feathers and gold she’d hidden on her person spooks the captain of the slave ship, who fears she’s an enchantress who’d once taken the form of a stork. (Storks are mute, lacking a syrinx; slavers are superstitious as well as evil.) The captain shows her more respect than the other poor creatures aboard his ship, but life is no picnic. Only the comfort of the other captives – and the children who huddle close to her on the cold nights -- keeps her somewhat sane, though knowing their eventual fate, and that these children will be separated from their mothers – for only women and children are captured by these loathsome men – is sickening. The only bright spots are the short-lasting but intense friendships made under these heartbreaking conditions.
The group is brought to what seems to now be Turkey after a grueling trip over land and water and the captives are eventually sold off, one by one or in small groups. The Irish woman’s four children are sold in a group to a Turk; she’s sold to someone else. Napoli’s brisk, low-key description of these sales of human beings are wrenching and difficult to read. Her narrative power is such, though, that the reader does get through these scenes, but with lumps in the throat and an itching at the back of the eyes. This is powerful writing.
Melkorka is the last to be sold, to Hosklund, an Icelandic chief buying supplies – wood, textiles, jewelry, men, women, and children – on a Russian island enclave. He’s not a brute but the result is still rape, sex without consent. It’s the end of the road, and there’s no happy ending there. Her fate is to become his concubine. Not a life her parents would have chosen for her: she’d been groomed to become the wife of a powerful king. But her parents, in foolishly seeking revenge, sealed her fate. And, ironically, because she’s so beautiful, when she reaches Iceland, the jealousy of the chief’s wife reduces her to low kitchen slavery. She’s gone as far down in rank as it’s possible to go, and there’ll be no knight in shining armor rounding the bend to rescue her.
Based on a number of mythic Scandinavian and Irish tales, this is an uncompromising book. While Donna Jo Napoli is drawn to retelling classic fairy tales, she does not necessarily provide the requisite happy endings. Nasty, brutish, and short is the only life Melkorka the Irish princess will have, was a life exactly like most people lived in the so-called Dark Ages of pre-medieval Europe. And the Vikings! The scourge of Europe, despoilers of monasteries and settlements, impossible to escape. There was even an Irish prayer: “From the fury of the Northmen, O, dear Lord, deliver us!”
What keeps this dark story from being thoroughly depressing is the redemption of Melkorka from haughty young woman to an individual unbroken by her harsh fate and made stronger by what she endures. Will she ever return to Ireland? Will she ever see her land and her family again? Did her father’s elaborate revenge plan work, or were they all slaughtered? Napoli gives no answers. At the end of the story all we know is that Melkorka is working in Hosklund’s kitchen and that a child was born of their shipboard union, a child with whom she speaks Gaelic, though she’s still selectively mute to everyone else, her silence continuing to be her refuge.
And Brigid, small, brave Brigid, she who could speak to the animals and was so savvy about human beings, did she swim to safety when she jumped into that freezing water? The thought she might have escaped her older sister’s fate was what gave me the little hope there was in this fine young adult novel. It had a profound effect on me, because, as a romance novelist, I prefer happy endings, the happier the better.
But I appreciate this book because it explores a time and place where young people do not necessarily go, and, you know, they should go there. Slavery exists in the 21st century as it did in 900 A.D. Ireland. There are significant parallels between the Dark Ages and our times. Evil doesn’t entirely disappear; it just morphs into something else, like the chilling child soldiers of Africa. This is a wonderful book, not only in its rich setting, its depth of characterization, but in its great humanity. Young adult literature is a genre overlooked by most of us who write adult fiction, but it’s a treasure waiting to be discovered, and any book by the highly imaginative Donna Jo Napoli, who, by the way, chairs the Linguistics Department at Swarthmore College, is highly recommended by this author.
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About the Reviewer:
Donna Jo Napoli and I have something in common: she loves writing young adult novels and I love reading them. There’s even more: we are both from Italian backgrounds and neither of us grew up with books in our homes. Oh, yes, we are both named Jo.
I was a children’s librarian before I went back to graduate school and trained to become a research/reference librarian in academia (Washington State University, U. of Miami, others) and the corporate world (Reader’s Digest, ABC News, Citibank). I’ve always regarded children’s literature as the purest form of fiction. These are often very moral books and the lessons in them, as well as the characters, stick with you all of your life. (Think LITTLE WOMEN, PETER PAN, A CHRISTMAS CAROL, et al.)
I’ve been writing fiction for publication since the 1990s. Starting with short stories (about a dozen were published in magazines and anthologies); going on to romance fiction (three novels - THE RELUCTANT GUARDIAN, SEDUCING MR. HEYWOOD, THE SICILIAN AMULET - two of them historical fiction); and my last book, MY LADY SCANDALOUS, a biography of the 18th century royal courtesan Grace Dalrymple Elliott, published by Simon & Schuster. Newest work-in-process, YOU CAN BE HAPPY WITHOUT A MAN, is – surprise! – a Young Adult novel set in Victorian England about a young girl’s attempts to find a husband for her mother.
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