Angelfall by Susan EeMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I read this for the Cryptozoologist square for Halloween Bingo
Men with wings. Angels of the Apocalypse. Supernatural beings who’ve pulverized the modern world and killed millions, maybe even billions of people.
This is categorized as YA, which made me a little nervous but besides having a heroine, Penryn, who I think is supposed to be around 17yrs old and some causal, leaning towards immature talk, this read adultish.
Even the worst of the new street gangs leave the night to whatever creatures may roam the darkness in this new world.
The beginning had me pretty locked in, I'm always up for an apocalyptic story but as the story went on, I started to get frustrated with the lack of world building. This is only book 1 in a 3 book series but I'm growing a little tired of incomplete stories for the sake of stretching out to sell more books. This is all from the pov of the heroine, so we only know her side of things about the angels attack and a lot of the time she is awfully tight lipped about what happened. The angels seemed to have dropped down to earth one day and started blowing up cities but frankly, even that is vague. Did they attack all over the world? There is talk about humans (maybe) killing Gabriel, but was it at first sight or was there some communication?
Not even the angels know why they are here.
Through some conversations with our heroine's companion Raffe, an angel she saved from being killed by other angels, we, again, vaguely get some intel from the angel's side of things but Raffe doesn't seem to know a whole heck of a lot either. This can work to create some mystery and excitement to read on in the series, to gain and learn the answers but it can also make the world building seem flimsy and lazy, keeping me from wanting to read on.
My mind swirls with conflicting emotions. Who is the enemy in this room? Whose side am I on?
Since our heroine is so young, it felt a little awkward with the alluding to a building attraction between her and who is supposed to be a millennial old angel. She thinks his chest and face is hot, he seems to admire her fighting skills and towards the end of the book, thinks she looks hot in a tight dress, there wasn't much for me to go on with the hit you at the end supposed to be epic love loss.
From the front, they look human, but from the back and the sides, they look utterly alien. Plump scorpion tails grow out of their tailbones to curl over their heads. They end in needlelike stingers, ready for piercing.
Most of the book is the heroine and angel traveling together and us readers getting a vague introduction to the world and characters. There is obviously something up with the heroine's mom but, again, vague. Towards the end, we get hit with some truly creepy described visuals and the dirty, grungy, and hungry apocalyptic world, starts to bleed into more of a horror show. The wall of children was some truly inspired horrific stuff.
The author had a great way of writing scenes that gave me some fantastic visuals but the character depth and world building was lacking for me. Even though this is a series and I expect some questions to be left answered in the preceding, I need a solid foundation to want to carry the interest over to the next books; not completely sure that happened here. The visuals were good, having an agnostic angel was intriguing, but the attraction between the heroine and hero was awkward and the world building felt shallow.
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