Review: Angelfall – Susan Ee

Susan Ee - Angelfall (Published by Hodder & Stoughton UK, 2013)

4/5

"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." Goodreads

I read 200 pages of this book in one day. I just could.not.put.it.down. I was like a woman obsessed trying to finish this book, and when that happens, it’s all for good reason. I put on my thunderstorm sounds for hours on end and I was totally content. I first started reading this on…the 16^th of March. March. It’s no secret that I fell off the bandwagon and the wagon proceeded to ride off without me into the sunset before I finally caught up to it five months later. Regardless, this was a staggered read for me at the beginning but when I picked it up today, I couldn’t let go of it. It’s been an awful while since I picked up a book I enjoyed so much, but I loved this one. It was a fantastic read! Also, how amazing does this cover look? I’m obsessed with angel wings. 

***SPOILERY***

So I finished watching the 90’s classic, and a childhood favourite of mine, Buffy the Vampire Slayer just a few days ago. One parallel I’ve drawn between Buffy and Penryn, the narrator of Angelfall, is just how badass they are as female protagonists. Obviously Buffy stands out of the crowd being a badass, independent, female protagonist but let’s not take the crown away from Penryn just yet! Amongst Young Adult fiction with a paranormal/fantastical world edge to it, we’re usually stuck with the base model of: human girl and a fantastical boy. Human girl is thrown into this world in which the fantastical boy has to introduce her (slow to the reader, we must drip-feed here, folks, to keep them interested and the story going). Then she falls for this coincidental attractive young male only for it to not be allowed (in some cases, not all) or something pulls them apart. You get the gist. However, –Susan Ee, I must applaud you–we are thrown into the post-apocalyptic world whereby the Angels have taken over and the humans are running scared. We do meet our love interest in the first few chapters, however, he isn’t a love interest, per-se. Throughout the novel there is a certain loyalty with a spark here and there, but neither one comes outright and says ‘hey, I like you, okay?’ or do all that teenage cliché crap. They kiss, for show. She thinks about him, but he’s a bit of an asshole toward her (not in the attractive way). He also shows not really any sign of liking her. It was refreshing. One more badass-female-protagonist point to Susan Ee is that as a narrator, she wasn’t irritating. Very hard to do, I find. There were times where she got a bit too much for me but then the action would kick in and she’d shut up.

The vibes I got from Angelfall were very The Mortal Instruments mixed with the Hush, Hush saga (both of which are my favourite series) with a little bit of ‘The Island’ (2005 film, directed by Michael Bay) in the last few scenes. I really enjoyed it because Susan Ee kept us on our toes. When we arrived at the camp, I more or less had half of the book to go and I was underestimating her thinking ‘okay, so we’ll plan an escape and then get pulled back in again and be trapped there under a strict regime’ but no, she got us out of there as quick as she got us in there without all of the hassle. Then managed to move us onto our next location, hanging around long enough to drive the plot and get to the juicy parts but not tiring us. I can’t really put my finger on it, but she executed it perfectly. I also really like her writing style and some of the lines she has in this novel are just superb. I was really impressed at how she delicately executed this novel, but like I said before, didn’t linger too long in places or overthink things. It was more about the character’s motives and striving to drive the plot than about their relationships with one another. I think the whole Penryn and Raffe story is going be explored and blossom in World After.

Now, it’s not the perfect novel and I’ll try not to linger too much on the downsides because I enjoyed this so much but let me point something out. One thing that made me feel a bit lost was the beginning of the book. Now, it’s not that it wasn’t explained right or that it wasn’t explained at all, it’s just I felt that I needed easing in a little more. I was just confused. Her mother has gone crazy, running off and hiding not to be seen again for a while, and Penryn can’t rely on her and doesn’t really feel bad for saying mean things about her. Then she’s wheeling her sister around in a shopping trolley. I was just confused by the whole thing but I continued through it. You got the just eventually after adding things up later on. The other thing that left me feeling lost was the description of the garage. Maybe I was distracted at the time with my mind wandering, but I couldn’t imagine how big this garage was then finding the glass cases with this hybrid angel-scorpion beasts hugging humans and draining the life out of them, only then to (as I recall) reach in to save one of the humans, but to find a pile of children and lo and behold, her sister is in that pile. Except, she’s not her sister, at least, not anymore, but more of a hybrid beast. It was all very strange and I still haven’t completely worked it out in my mind but I kept reading through it. Apart from those two (very poignant parts of the novel, admittedly) instances, I can’t say I disagreed with anything else from the novel.

Now I’m stuck in a dilemma as what to read next. I have four unread books on my shelves, one of them being the sequel to Angelfall called World After (which I won in a Goodreads competition!) but this would mean I couldn’t buy the third and last in the series due to those unread books I have waiting to be read. However, this story is still fresh in my mind so to move onto a different book would mean trying to catch up again. I’m making this a bigger deal than it is, I'll probably read the sequel, let's be honest, I'm too involved now.