Thursday, February 19, 2015

Book Review: Angelfall by Susan Ee (3.5/5)

Title: Angelfall
Author: Susan Ee
Publisher: Feral Dream
Pages: 283
Genre: Young Adult, Paranormal, Dystopian, Romance, Fantasy
Rating: 3.5/5

It has been 6 weeks since the angels have taken over. 6 weeks of living in constant danger.

Penryn Young’s whole life has changed. Instead of planning for college years, she’s desperately protecting her family from the dark creatures that have taken over her world. But things haven’t stabilized yet: her life is tossed once again into confusion when she witnesses a fight between angels which results in an injured angel left behind and her sister, Paige, kidnapped. Now the only thing Penryn can do is help the wingless angel in hopes that he’ll be able to help rescue Paige.

Raffe was always the strongest of the angels. But when he finds himself on the verge of death, he can do nothing but accept a strange girl’s help. Now Penryn and Raffe have one thing in mind – attack the angel headquarters. But even though they share the same goal, they both have different motives. With Penryn aching for her sister and Raffe yearning for his wings, the two must fight together if they have any chance of succeeding – or even surviving. 

Even though the whole story was centered on Penryn’s travels, Raffe was my favorite character. For one, he was kind and caring. In the beginning it seemed as if he had a hard outer shell but as the book progressed, I was able to learn more about Raffe. Another thing is, though this might sound cheesy,  Raffe is a hero. Plain and simple. Rescuing Paige and saving her from harm really helped build up his character. I’m all for a girl fighting for herself, but good ol’ fashioned gallantry never gets old and is quite charming. And to top it off, it doesn’t really hurt that Raffe’s gorgeous. He’s tall, handsome and has wings – or is trying to get them back anyways. With all these characteristics and more, Raffe was definitely a character I had fun reading about.  

Then there was Penryn. She did have her moments, but most of the time I was annoyed with her. Some of the decisions she made just seemed so infuriatingly stupid. As in, nobody in their right mind would actually make those decisions. And it isn’t as if it’s only this heroine who makes these stupid mistakes. No, Penryn is just one of those ditzy girls who makes stupid choices. But despite this flaw, she was a well-built character: she had a great backstory, had a (somewhat working) ability to differentiate between the right and wrong thing to do, and her cunning wit, or lack of, was absolutely hilarious to read. But, in the end, Susan Ee could have definitely made Penryn’s character pop a bit more.

Now on to the actual book. So, when I first read the summary I wasn’t that excited. Sure, a bit of me was intrigued, but there was an overwhelming groan of disappointment: there didn’t seem to be anything special about this book!! Yet, as I continued to read, I was continuously surprised by how exceptional the plot and writing was. There was a captivating adventure, romance, and (as described above) interesting characters.

Reading about Raffe and Penryn’s ventures was quite interesting. The 283 pages in this book were chock filled with different activities the two did. Seeing how the two travelled to their final destination and how much they had changed in the short amount of time was astounding. But there was more than one lull in the book where I had to skip a few pages because I was completely and utterly bored. The problem was that the author kept going on and on about the most pointless of details. There was a lot of futile information, which could have been replaced with more relevant details.

But on the other hand, I loved the romance plot. Sure it was more than a bit clichéd, but I thought it worked pretty well that Raffe was unable to get involved with Penryn because she was a “Daughter of Man”. Besides that, the two of them had a great chemistry. One part of the romance plot that I greatly enjoyed was that it never stopped building. In fact the climax of the love story was at the end, which created an amazing cliffhanger for what was to happen in the next book.

All in all, ‘Angelfall’ was a read I won’t regret. Filled with adventure, romance and wings, this book is definitely one of the more interesting ones I’ve read in a while. I recommend this book for teenagers 14+ mainly because of the gore and romance in this book. If you like young adult, romance or any dystopian novels, this is one you will want to try out. Don’t miss the second book ‘World After’ and the third book in this series which is expected to be released in 2015. 

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