Title: Angelfall
Author: Susan EE
Series: Penryn & the End of Days, (Book 1)
Genre: Young Adult, Fantasy, SciFi
Pages: 224
Format Read: Audio
Publisher: Filia
Published: July 3, 2013
Goodreads Synopsis:
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.
My Rating: ☆☆☆
Disclaimer, disclaimer! I am a self-proclaimed angel enthusiast! I love studying angel lore! Cheyenne Raphael is my pen name because Archangel Raphael is the angel of healing and the patron angel of the blind. Therefore, I had some angelic expectations upon opening this book!
I did really enjoy Angelfall, but it was also a bit of a let down for me. I’ll hit the high points first, and then I’ll get into the… not so great stuff. And we’re gonna do this in bullet point form today because I have to do chemistry homework after this is over… Yay me…
The Awesome Stuff!
- Penryn Young is a total badass! Like she is awesome, and I love her sarcastic attitude, and we would either be best friends or one of us would kill the other! I’d probably be the one to die…
- Penryn’s Mom has paranoid schizophrenia, and it is portrayed very well. I love books with mentally ill characters that aren’t just there for the sake of having mentally ill characters! Like she’s crazy, and that’s a problem, but it’s also not a problem, and that’ll make more sense when you actually read it… Maybe…
- There are angels! And they’re actually real angels mentioned in the lore! Sort of…
- Penryn’s little sister is wheel chair bound, which is awesome because I don’t see many books with wheel chair bound characters! I have NO idea if it’s a good portrayal of a wheel chair bound character because obviously I’ve never experienced that. It could be totally stereotypical like most blind characters in YA literature, but it seemed pretty darn good to me, and the fact that we had a schizophrenic character and a character in a wheel chair in the same book is awesome! (someone please tell me if this is a good wheel chair bound character because now I really wanna know…)
- The plot keeps you on your toes! In fact, it kept me up until midnight trying to finish it… And I had to do Algebra the next day… That went well! Not!
- I was really able to get into Penryn’s head and connect with her character. The writing style and POV made that really easy, and it was literally an emotional rollercoaster!
- I listened to the audio book, and the narrator was amazing!!! That has absolutely nothing to do with anything unless you love audio books like I do, so just go with it if you don’t….
The Not So Great Stuff:
- The angels are… interesting. I guess I didn’t really expect it to follow the lore exactly, but I didn’t expect them to be kinda warped either. And… There’s some stuff in there that bugs me about the whole God/angel connection thing. You’ll get it when you read it…
- The romance aspect seems kinda silly to me! Like… It’s not very believable! I get that it’s fantasy, but usually I can suspend my disbelief and become absorbed in the story enough to believe anything, and that didn’t happen with this relationship! I can’t say anymore for fear of spoilers, so just see for yourself!
- Why does every chapter end with a massive cliff hanger?! That’s cool sometimes, but it got old after about the first five times it happened. I’m the kind of person who can’t stand to stop anywhere other than a chapter break, and those, “whose gonna die?!” cliff hangers were making it reeeeeally hard to find a good place to stop and sleep! Hence the midnight reading…
- The writing was a little overdone in some places. I noticed it mainly with dialogue and descriptions, which is something I notice a lot because I have to watch it in my own writing. I mean… We get that the city is in ruin; you don’t have to tell us fifty-two thousand times! And the dead body description is making me sick…
- Why are there suddenly creepy alien monsters being created in an angelic science lab? Where did that even come from? Is that just there for a weird plot twist to keep people up reading late and give them nightmares, or is it going to mean something later? Ok… It did mean something, but it was just a little shocking, and nothing really lead up to that. I had this whole elaborate plot worked out in my head the way I would have written it, and then it all crumbled to the ground with freaky stuff that seemed like it didn’t belong. We already had demons, and then these weird, creepy, SciFi monsters took over the plot and i didn’t see their connection to the previously mentioned demons!
- What is with that ending?! It just stopped suddenly, and nothing really came to any kind of close! I get that there are more books in the series, but even though it is a series, it needs some kind of closure or else it’s gonna drive me insane! And not the good kind of insane that makes me want to keep reading! That goes back to the massive cliff hangers getting old after a while…
Final thoughts:
I liked Angelfall, and I will probably finish the series, but the other books got shoved further down my TBR list after reading the ending. I wasn’t impressed with the ending, and endings are the one way for a writer to hold my trust. If you can’t write a good ending, I won’t trust you to write a good series. That’s ironic since I struggle with endings myself, but it’s just how I am! The cliff-hanger chapters threw me off too. I like short chapters, and I don’t mind cliff-hangers at all, but we don’t need a giant cliff-hanger to end every chapter. Sometimes it is perfectly ok to write a small cliff-hanger that doesn’t immediately threaten anyone’s life. I did really like Penryn’s character, and her and her sister are honestly probably the only reason I plan to continue the series. I thought I’d like it for the angels, but they’re just weird… Angels shouldn’t be weird!
What Do You Think?
Have you read Angelfall? Are you going to read Angelfall? Do you agree or disagree with me? Let’s talk bookworm stuff in the comments!
P.S: My laptop is insisting on autocorrecting Penryn to Penny, so sorry about that if I missed any! I tried… I really tried… But technology hates me today…
From Cheyenne 🙂
Cheyenne Raphael Writes 