Brief Summary Of The Book Hush By Donna Jo Napoli

During the 900s, princess Melkorka from Ireland was kidnapped by a Russian crew and sailed north towards a marketplace. Because she is being held captive, she has no power or control over anything except her voice. She chooses to stay silent and used that to gain power over her owners. This helps readers because instead of dialogue, the audience is mainly observing. She is eventually sold to Hoskuld, a Viking that was headed toward Iceland. She is used as a sex slave on his voyage. Slowly, she notices more about The Viking world around her. This is the plot of the book Hush, by Donna Jo Napoli. The novel Hush accurately exhibits how technology such as a ship was used by The Vikings, but the description of a slave's life was harshened to create

Vikings learned to follow coastlines and the sun to learn which way they were heading and whether they were close to land. In the novel they were “hugging a new shore…from the path of the sun, I realize we were heading south” (Napoli 242). Melkorka uses the coast and the sun to tell where they are and which direction they are heading in. Because she was a captive on a ship, she was not aware of where she was on the coast. She worked hard to notice landmarks on the coastline, so she had an idea of where she was. The whole crew uses these techniques to make sure they are travelling the right way and a safe distance from the coast. In the 900s, sailors mainly relied on landmarks to direct themselves. They did use shorelines and the sun; they also looked for markings like landmarks to find their way up the European coast (“Viking Longships”). Vikings used all of these techniques to help them navigate and not get lost on a long voyage. Throughout the book, Vikings navigational skills were portrayed accurately compared to how voyages were navigated during that specific time

In the novel, Napoli writes following a slave girl as she is passed from one owner to another after being captured and kidnapped. For slaves treatment varies, but it definitely helps to be a young girl who is still a virgin and doesn’t need as much food. Haywood proves this in his book when he explains how women slaves are more valued when he wrote “Because they are desirable for sex they can easily fetch three times the price of a healthy male slave..". In the novel, Melkorka is treated better than most other slaves because of her gender and age. Most slaves would sell at a market for labor, but instead Melkorka is sold as a sex slave. When her owner “Clay Man” brings all of his slaves to the market she is the last one sold. She sells for more money than anyone else and is held longer by “Clay Man” as a possibility of not selling her, so he could keep her as his own. She is valued more by any owner because she is a young woman who could be used for more than just labor. On her boat there are two women slaves. One is an older lady with a hunchback and a glass eye. As predicted she was treated much better than the other women because she had sexual appeal. She was never required to complete any “dirty” work like the other crew members (Napoli 214). This deal of women over men from the novel was proven accurate in John Haywood's novel when he writes about how somebody could