Wednesday 4 January 2012

Angelfall (Penryn and the End of Days, Book 1)


I started reading this one just before Christmas, when I saw it highly recommended on a couple of blogs.  It appears at present only to be available in ebook format, so I downloaded it to my Kindle for PC for the princely sum of 77p.  Let it be known now that was a good buy!

First off, I adore that cover.  Many self-published books have poor covers (I am assuming it is self-published, apologies to Ms Ee if not) but this one is right up my street.  Gold angel wings and inky, painty, splodgy goodness appeals to the altered artist in me.  So I went into this one with a good feeling.

I wasn't sure what I was expecting of the novel itself, to be honest.  It soon became clear it is one of those books like Hunger Games and Twilight that are pitched firmly at the teen market but can successfully cross over into the adult one too. It's written in simple sentences, but the joy of the novel is in the pacing. Where Twilight disappears off into morose teenage navel-gazing, Angelfall rattles along like a car with the accelerator stuck down.  It really is one of those novels where you get to bedtime and promise yourself you will stop at the end of the chapter, but end up carrying on, bleary-eyed because you just plain have to find out what happens next.

The premise is an interesting one.  War has broken out between angels and mankind, the Archangel Gabriel has been killed in one of the attacks and it has become apocalyptic. The story is set in a California destroyed in the war, where the remaining humans hide from the angels, venturing out only to search for whatever food is left in shops and offices, and subsisting on cat kibble where necessary.  Inexplicably, there is still running water even after this carnage, but given the teen obsession with personal hygiene I'll let the teenage protagonist have her occasional shower!

Penryn, our protagonist, has a young wheelchair-bound sister, Paige, and a mentally unstable mother who is off her medication since the war and progressively more doolally as the book continues.  Right at the start, the three venture out and step into the middle of an angel-on-angel fight.  One angel is being beaten to within an inch of his life by the others and has his wings cut off by his assailants.  Penryn uses his sword to fight the others off and they leave, but not before plucking Paige from her wheelchair and carrying her off.  Seeing the critically injured angel as the only way she is likely to save her sister, Penryn helps him and they become uneasy allies : Penryn using him to get to the Eyrie where the angels may have her sister, while also getting him back to the angels and the possibility of having his wings restored.

The angel goes by the name of Raffe.  Now I'm quite well up on archangels from one of my fandoms, so it wasn't too much of a stretch to work out that he is the Archangel Raphael.  Of the others, Michael gets a mention later and Uriel appears for the climactic scenes.  Chuck a human resistance movement and the sort of anarchic breakdown familiar from most post-apocalyptic scenarios into the mix, add a dash of angel politics and a ballsy protagonist who doesn't know when to lie down, and you have a cracking good read.

Literature it ain't, but if you want a page turner and like novels with a supernatural element then you could do much worse.  I'm off to nag my 14 year old daughter into reading it and am awarding it my first five stars of the year.  I'll be reading the other books as they come out too.

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