Review: Rapture, A Fallen Novel – Lauren Kate

Lauren Kate - Rapture, A Fallen Novel (Published by Corgi Childrens, February 2013)

2/5

"The sky is dark with wings. And time is running out for Luce and Daniel. In order to stop Lucifer from erasing the past, they must find the place where the Fall began. Only Luce can break the curse, and it is her choice alone that will decide all of their fates. But as Dark Forces gather, great sacrifices will have to be made in this final, epic struggle. In the fight for Luce, and for Love, who will win? The astonishing climax to the Fallen series. Heaven can't wait any longer." Goodreads

I’m not a massive fan of this series, if I’m totally honest. There’s a few reasons for this but it’s mainly because the books are just plainly and simply confusing. With Fallen I had to read it twice in order to wrap my head around what the hell was going on—but that’s another matter. Although it’s been ages since I read Passion—my favourite of the series!—and even longer since I read the first novel, I found it hard to catch up with the plot because it was so slow paced and lackadaisical. Before I get into my analysis, I feel like I need to comment that this is the third time I’ve picked this book up and without having forced myself through the beginning and surpassing my two previous bookmarks, I would have put it back down again. However, I felt like I owed it to myself, and to the characters, to finish it and find out how their story ended. I do, however, want to comment on the cover art of the entire series, I mean, they’re gorgeous aren’t they?

***SPOILERY***

Back to the nitty-gritty. This is so slow paced and lackadaisical. I say this purely because if you had finished Passion, travelling different time zones with Luce’s past lives after the Outcasts had descended on her parents Thanksgiving meal, and then had to wait a year for the next novel to come out, like me, you’d find yourself a bit lost. This is due to the fact you probably would have forgotten that only a mere few hours had passed between the end of Torment/beginning of Passion and Kate doesn’t give much indication of this when Luce is waking from a sleep on an island somewhere. She briefly mentions it, but for me, at least, it didn’t click right away. It wasn’t until I got to my second bookmark—the furthest point I had reached in both attempts—that I had any awareness of what was going on which was around the middle chapter three. After the past-paced nature of Passion, each chapter jumping into a different lifetime, a different time period, this is a bit of a shock. However, from there on out, the novel moved slightly faster as more characters were introduced and with the Outcasts joining Team Daniel and Luce, and the threat of the Scale and Elders, I found it easier to jump back into the world of endless love and angels and demons. Mind you, I did stop around chapter ten for several days whereby I got bored again and picked up another book.

I feel like throughout there’s a lot of repetitiveness and moaning from Luce. I felt that flying everywhere and feeling Daniel’s arms around her waist as she slept or looked up at him adoringly just bored me silly. The one thing I cannot stand in a female protagonist in Young Adult fiction—which unfortunately you find in 90% of novels—is an irritating, moaning, female lusting over her boyfriend saying how much she loves them and will die without them, how their eyes twinkle under the moonlight and how great their muscles look bulging beneath their shirts/jumpers blah, blah, blah. Even when you’re a teenager, although you think the world will end if they leave you, you go to school, eat your dinner and go to bed like normal because life goes on; you’re young and infatuated, but there’s got to be a point for the writer to sympathise with the reader and give it a rest sometime? I understand that the entire series surrounds their endless love and how they’ve found each other for thousands of years, spanning countless lifetimes, but you almost feel exhausted for them because they just won’t relent. We get it, you love each other. Enough?

Just a quick note before I comment on what I liked, I found it a bit too Hollywood cheesy that Luce turned out to be one of the original angels in heaven. Having her own wings, that’s fair play, but being one of the original during the Fall, it seemed a bit too cliché. I feel that that could have been avoided and you’d be able to tell the story, filling in all of the blanks for the characters, and the reader so it all made sense. I’m going to also mention whilst I’m here that Kate’s writing style annoyed me a lot throughout the novel, particularly the first half. Her inability to shorten the sentences, adding in too much information frustrated me to no end! I feel like I have every right to comment on this as I used to do it myself so I understand where she’s coming from, but from a readers point of view, I understand that it’s incredibly annoying as you lose track of the sentence was originally saying. You could easily split the sentence into two or three separate ones and it’ll still make sense! Luckily, toward the end of the novel, this had dissipated somewhat.

Regarding the whole plot, I think it’s better than Fallen, but Passion, especially, and Torment trump Rapture in my opinion. I think the touch at the end of chapter nineteen whereby Lucinda and Daniel stood before the throne, made their decision to choose each other rather than a side and thereby made mortal was a lovely touch. Where Kate redeemed herself was the final chapter whereby Luce and Daniel found one another once again in boarding school was a perfect symmetry, but we also saw a beautiful and vulnerable side of Daniel. For someone as tough as Daniel who is driving Luce to be more adventurous and teaching her lessons, supplying all of the information about all things angel and past-life-Luce, it was nice to see him without knowledge—on the same level as Luce: just a boy and a girl talking on a bench about normal things. I found it comical that Arianne, Annabelle, Miles, Roland and Shelby were watching from far above like they were watching a film at the cinema. It was endearing that Luce was an angel—somewhat predictable after her dream about flying, but nevertheless!—and she had fallen in love with Lucifer. Like Daniel and Luce sat on the bench at Emerald College, we saw a vulnerable side to basically the royally pointed King of all things Evil, which is nice because sometimes you forget that evil characters, no matter who they are, weren’t always evil.

Overall, it’s not my favourite novel I’ve ever read, but it by far wasn’t the worst one either. I’d like to be able to read the whole series again and read it knowing Lucinda’s true identity to see how differently I’d interpret it, but due certain parts of the novels and the slow paced nature of this novel especially, but certainly other parts of the other three novels, it may take me a while to pick this series back up again. I’m so glad I finally finished it though and found out how Daniel and Luce first met and how their story ended—it’s nice to put a bow on the ending of a story!