Monday, August 1, 2016

Angelfall by Susan Ee (Penryn & the End of Days #1)

Title: Angelfall

Author: Susan Ee

Pages: 282 (paperback)

Synopsis: "It's been six weeks since angels of the apocalypse descended to demolish the modern world. Street gangs rule the day while fear and superstition rule the night. When warrior angels fly away with a helpless little girl, her seventeen-year-old sister Penryn will do anything to get her back.

Anything, including making a deal with an enemy angel.

Raffe is a warrior who lies broken and wingless on the street. After eons of fighting his own battles, he finds himself being rescued from a desperate situation by a half-starved teenage girl.

Traveling through a dark and twisted Northern California, they have only each other to rely on for survival. Together, they journey toward the angels' stronghold in San Francisco where she'll risk everything to rescue her sister and he'll put himself at the mercy of his greatest enemies for the chance to be made whole again." -Goodreads


This book starts out with an action packed beginning, and it does not stop. I found this book to be so gripping intense. The book started out a little slow because of the build up of the world and characters, but as I progressed, I didn't want to put it down. The drives into gritty and raw topics that we have to seriously question if we were ever in an apocalypse world.

What would we eat? What if there were no animals to eat?

This book drives into topics like Cannibalism, which is something that I think YA doesn't touch on. In an dystopian society, where is our food coming from? There isn't much of it left without factories, so would you consider eating other people? These are raw topics that we don't want to think about in the world we live in, but are things that we would have to answer to when we not ate much of anything in weeks.

It also dives into things like loss and what happens to the mentally ill when there are no medications to take care of their illnesses. These are things that I think are extremely important in the genre, and especially important to note in Young Adult literature.

Each of these characters came to life in their own unique ways. Penryn is such a strong characters, and in the world that she is in, that is a necessity to survive. She continues to take another step forward to save her sister, even though she could die at any point.

Her mother is so unique and twisted. She shows a darkness that is not usually represented in the YA genre. She added the another dark element that shows demons that people live with when having people like her in their lives. People like these characters exist. They are terrible but real.

I liked how the world builded. I enjoyed how the story was a slow burn. There were times when I wanted more information about the world, but I appreciated the lack of info dumps more than my desire for knowledge.

The only things that really lacked for me were how some of the actions scenes felt quite short. They seemed like they were done in no time, and they sometimes left me confused because of this. 

The other thing that didn't really work for me as a reader was the agnostic angel. I appreciated the authors attempt at diversity in religion, but with angel I just didn't understand it. It didn't really flow for me and felt a little forced.


Have you read Angelfall? If so, let me know what you thought in the comments.


No comments:

Post a Comment