Angelfall by Susan Ee || Sarcastic angels and angry heroines

It’s been six weeks since angels of the apocalypse descended to demolish the modern world. Street gangs rule the day while fear and superstition rule the night. When warrior angels fly away with a helpless little girl, her seventeen-year-old sister Penryn will do anything to get her back.

Anything, including making a deal with an enemy angel.

Raffe is a warrior who lies broken and wingless on the street. After eons of fighting his own battles, he finds himself being rescued from a desperate situation by a half-starved teenage girl.

Traveling through a dark and twisted Northern California, they have only each other to rely on for survival. Together, they journey toward the angels’ stronghold in San Francisco where she’ll risk everything to rescue her sister and he’ll put himself at the mercy of his greatest enemies for the chance to be made whole again. (Synopsis taken from Goodreads)

I’ve been hearing about this series for a little while. It keeps popping up on both my Amazon and Goodreads “recommended reads” list, and it sounded interesting, I had a Barnes & Noble gift card left over from my birthday, so I thought why not?

I didn’t love it. But I didn’t hate it, either.

Now, this book paints a very dangerous, somewhat gory world, and I think that’s pretty realistic, actually. A lot of YA post-apocalypse novels actually aren’t that violent. They’re more about the lack of fresh food and clean water and whatever. This book has that kind of thing, yes, but it also has people who should be on medications but aren’t, people who should be in prison but aren’t, people who need medical care but aren’t, and this just generally causes a very brutal world.

Now, there are some things that I liked.

-Raffe; at first glance, he’s a very cliche love interest (you know, hot, brooding, somewhat helpless paranormal guy), but he’s actually pretty funny and his sarcastic banter with Penryn (the narrator) is the best. And he’s not flat, either. He’s just as developed as Penryn.

-Penryn herself. Penryn has this very matter-of-fact view on everything. Survive. Find mom. Save sister. And she’s not a boring narrator. She’s actually rather engaging, and she strikes me as someone I would want to be friends with.

-The fact that there were minorities represented. Again, post-apocalypse novels tend to be about the white, able-bodied survivors. But Penryn’s little sister, Paige (who is adorable), is in a wheelchair. Her mom is schizophrenic, AND has been off her meds for a while, so there are some problems there. But, again, it painted a really realistic picture.

-This book has been described as horror, and, yes, there’s a pretty decent dose of horror. Lots of blood and guts and dead people and little black shadow-demons that eat children.

But there are some things I didn’t like.

-Where are all the people? Penryn is wandering through San Fransisco and Silicon Valley and the surrounding areas, and she rarely runs into other people. Even if everyone vacated to, say, Texas, there would still be the odd person who doesn’t want to go to Texas.

-And I don’t really know how they angels caused so much chaos and death in the first place? They seemed like kind of awkward, dorky, unorganized people. 

-The plot kind of went around in circles. Yes, Penryn wants to save her sister. But that is kind of shunted aside toward the middle, in exchange for…I don’t really know what. It just kind of dragged.

So, yeah, I didn’t LOVE this book like I was told I would, but I still enjoyed it, and I’ll be reading the next couple of books in the series.

So, y’know those feathers in the picture? While I was painting them, I noticed my brother kind of staring at me out of the corner of his eye. The conversation went kind of like this.

Him: “So…you’re painting the feathers to look like they’ve been splattered in blood?”

Me: “Yep.”

Him: “For a picture?”

Me: “Yep.”

Him:”Okay…”

Rather entertaining.

In other news, I was at University Bookstore for the Star’s Above launch! If you want to look, I’m in one of the pictures of the event on the Fierce Read’s instagram. I’m in the very front row in a green coat. You can see my left shoulder.

But yeah, it was fun. And we got there three hours early because when we called to make sure that the book had been set aside for me, the guy said the event planners were expecting it to fill up fast. It did. But, because I got there three hours early, I was one of the first ten or so people that had the book signed, so there was no crazy-long line to wait in like the at the Winter launch party.

So…have any of you blogglings read Angelfall? Do you want too? If you have read it, did you like it or dislike it? Were any of you at the Star’s Above launch, also?

Happy Wednesday,