Review: World After – Susan Ee

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

3/5

"In this sequel to the bestselling fantasy thriller, Angelfall, the survivors of the angel apocalypse begin to scrape back together what's left of the modern world. 

When a group of people capture Penryn's sister Paige, thinking she's a monster, the situation ends in a massacre. Paige disappears. Humans are terrified. Mom is heartbroken.

Penryn drives through the streets of San Francisco looking for Paige. Why are the streets so empty? Where is everybody? Her search leads her into the heart of the angels' secret plans where she catches a glimpse of their motivations, and learns the horrifying extent to which the angels are willing to go.

Meanwhile, Raffe hunts for his wings. Without them, he can't rejoin the angels, can't take his rightful place as one of their leaders. When faced with recapturing his wings or helping Penryn survive, which will he choose?" Goodreads

I finished this book in two days. It would have been marathoned in one day however I watched too many episodes of Homeland and lost track of time. I’m currently waiting on the third book to arrive which I ordered earlier today so for the mean time I am going to occupy myself with something else. I was extremely grateful to have won my copy of this book from a Goodreads competition.

I have never read a dystopian book series before and although this isn’t high dystopian fantasy, it was a great way to introduce myself to the sub-genre. Now that I have tipped my foot into the world of dystopian fantasy, I am really excited to try more!

***SPOILERY***

Remember how people felt about the Twilight Saga’s Eclipse being a filler book? That’s kind of how I felt about this and considering it’s a trilogy, that’s not great. I feel that Susan Ee was fleshing out the world in this book. She was introducing us to elements that she touched upon in the first novel of the series, Angelfall, like the hybrid scorpion creatures. We’re introduced into another lab and shown how they are made. Again, however, I find myself extremely confused as to how this process works. It don’t think it’s from the way Susan Ee described it, I’m just very unfamiliar with this kind of world. For instance–as I mentioned in my last review–the only way I have of imagining myself being in this scenario is based off the film The Island whereby they keep people in these egg sacks etc. This slight jarring didn’t affect me overall with the plot, though.

With her last novel, we, as Penryn, the narrator, had a strong plot thread that drove the narrative and kept us read: the sole goal of rescuing Paige. I found in World After that there wasn’t a strong thread running throughout the novel which didn’t drive me to read on. I read on because I wanted to finish it. I felt like we were bumbling through the story with mini narrative goals that were achieved in a short amount of time. I suppose, if I were to even the score here, I would say that our goal was to get Raffe’s wings back and to eventually find him, I suppose, but one half of that isn’t even our goal. It’s his. It’s not clear cut.

The action really picked up for me when Raffe and Penryn reunited. There’s something about them together that juices up the plot and the speed of the narrative. Although, again, I applaud that Penryn can hold her own alone in the novel without cooing over Raffe all the time or becoming too moany-narrator which often happens in Young Adult novels. I think they’re totally sweet together and so obviously they’ll get together in the third novel despite it being forbidden; angels with the Daughters of Men. We all know it’ll happen, it’s just a case of when and how.

So, in this novel we’ve gotten rid of one of two of our antagonist’s so I’m intrigued as to where Susan Ee is going to take the third novel. Is our final goal to fully repair Raffe’s wings now he’s retrieved them, and to cure Paige? This one was fast paced, just not as fast paced as the first. I’m just eagerly watching my front door for the postman to arrive with the third and final book.