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.
