Susan Ee- Angelfall, chronique

Ok, I love fantasy and I love Buffy-Angel (hi! Hi!) impossible love-story types, but as hard as I tried, I couldn’t quite surrender to Angelfall.

All in all, it’s a good book and I have to say the last chapters make the whole work worth reading.
Generally speaking, it has everything a low-fantasy teenage book needs: action, strong and funny characters, wit, unresolved tension… but that one thing that would make it the actual ‘low-fantasy’ thingy it claims to be is constantly pushed aside. Hurgh!
Beware spoilers! 

• ·         The fantasy: Paige? Pff! She falls quickly into oblivion. Raffe’s wings or lack thereof? Pff! They are joining Paige by now. Her mother? Pfffff! So far (though I’m not sure Ee doesn’t have a surprise for us there) she’s just there to complicate the heroine’s life and provide her with a reason for being a kick-ass girl (the latter being a good point, obviously). The biting ‘low demons’? Pff! It takes the longest of time for Penryn to get their story so that Ee makes sure that story evolves very slowly indeed. That way, she doesn’t need to actually deal with it. All of those things have been invented, yeah, but they’re not really being used, or not wisely. We’ve been hooked but while we weren’t watching, the hooks have changed. Obviously, this is made right again by the end of the book since the intrigue needs to solve itself out ; but I’m talking about more than 240 pages of fantasy being put off.

• ·        Characterization: then, the aerie bit is kind of disappointing: apart from Raffe, those angels are so uninteresting, especially when compared to the heroine! That’s bad because it was the occasion to bring forth the fantasy and it just ends up being another taste of humanity. It’s not even like those angels are metaphors, no, they’re basically human with wings, just more ridiculous.

• ·         Writing: the book feels rushed, almost as if it had been written in two weeks. There is talent in the writing but it seems to lack the corresponding effort. Part of the point of adult writing aimed at teenagers is that it can broaden their world, worldviews, and knowledge. I know that sounds boring and reasonable but it doesn’t need to take precedence over the fun of fantastical angel-human intense passion; it just needs to be there, if only in the writing style. Ee doesn’t try hard enough to make the feelings of her heroine felt by the reader. Penryn, indeed, sounds exactly like a teenager (a strong one at that), but just too much. Every two sentences start with the words ‘I see’, ‘I hear’, ‘I feel’, or ‘He’ or ‘We’, you get the gist. Other types of sentence structure are so noteworthy that I ended up picking upon them as soon as I found them.

Hence, moments of tensed suspense go quickly out the window because no time is really taken to explore them. Apart from the ending, it’s very fast reading. Even those feelings you’d expect to don’t linger (her worry for her sister?) so that the witty back and forth between angel/human can take the front line. For instance, Penryn needs to rescue her sister from the aerie, and right when they enter the said aerie which is supposed to be a within-enemy-lines moment, it turns out to be a romantic moment for her and Raffe with a jazz-like angel-human crowd in the background. So, basically, this more-than-human take on the aerie was just a way of arranging a background scene for romance to happen; again, the post-apocalyptic-world-under-angel-dominion storyline is of no importance; no, what really matters is the will-Penryn-ever-get-Raffe? eternal question.
This low-fantasy teenage version of a harlequin does make for a pleasant reading but ‘pleasant’ is not enough, for my interest was piqued. I was in, and the insides proved not enough to satisfy me.

I doubt I’ll be reading more of the trilogy.