 | Title: Angelfire
 Kissing. References to sex.
My Rating:
Good - A fun read with minor flaws. Maybe read an excerpt before buying. |
Description
This debut, the first novel in a trilogy, is achingly romantic, terrifying, and filled with blistering action.
When seventeen-year-old Ellie starts seeing reapers - monstrous creatures who devour humans and send their souls to Hell - she finds herself on the front lines of a supernatural war between archangels and the Fallen and faced with the possible destruction of her soul.
A mysterious boy named Will reveals she is the reincarnation of an ancient warrior, the only one capable of wielding swords of angelfire to fight the reapers, and he is an immortal sworn to protect her in battle. Now that Ellie's powers have been awakened, a powerful reaper called Bastian has come forward to challenge her. He has employed a fierce assassin to eliminate her - an assassin who has already killed her once.
While balancing her dwindling social life and reaper-hunting duties, she and Will discover Bastian is searching for a dormant creature believed to be a true soul reaper. Bastian plans to use this weapon to ignite the End of Days and to destroy Ellie's soul, ending her rebirth cycle forever. Now, she must face an army of Bastian's most frightening reapers, prevent the soul reaper from consuming her soul, and uncover the secrets of her past lives - including truths that may be too frightening to remember.
Review
The best parts of ANGELFIRE are like an early season of Buffy where Angel and Giles have been combined into one beautiful, brooding guardian/teacher. There’s a supernatural heroine who finds out she must battle the forces of evil while trying to remain a normal high school girl, she has a mix of friends who help, and some serious Daddy issues.
ANGELFIRE relies on one of my least favorite plot contrivances to make the story work: the heroine has a supernatural past that she has forgotten about and it’s up to her love interest to gradually restore her memory at key points throughout the book. The problem with this set up is that the hero, Will in this case, is already in love with Ellie, so magic of the couple falling in love is substantially minimized.
I also had some difficulty relating to Ellie. She’s a rich, spoiled, shallow teenager. Her group of friends all spend money like fiends and on her birthday, Ellie’s parents buy her an Audi. She gets drunk a lot, goes shopping for slutty Halloween costumes and her grades are likely to keep her out of college. Yet were supposed to buy that she’s a millennial old supernatural warrior know as the Preliator, the only one capable of wielding Angelfire and defeating the soul sucking Reapers. It’s a hard sell.
I did like the character of Will and especially enjoyed the training scenes he shared with Ellie, not just when he was teaching her to master her strength and abilities, but also because those scenes were when Will opened up to her and showed a vulnerable side that YA heroes rarely display. Ellie likewise lost her superficiality and became a much more likeable character.
Overall, angels are getting a lot of play in the YA market of late, and ANGELFIRE is a good though not great addition. The revelation at the end was a bit groan worthy, but there’s enough Buffy-like moments that I still enjoyed the story. The second book in the Angelfire trilogy is called WINGS OF THE WICKED and will be released in 2012.
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Thank you for this honest review! I tried, I really did, to get into this book, and it simply did not work for me - with all the positive reviews out there, I kept thinking I was missing something. I didn't review it just yet because I want to see a finished copy first, but yeah, it felt like a way too familiar plot and none of the characters stood out to me.
ReplyDeleteBibliophile - I feel like I've been in a YA funk lately. Everyone keeps raving about these titles that are just average to me. I've got Kelly Gay's new YA written under Kelly Keaton so I think things are about to start looking up :)
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed this book! I haven't read a lot of other angel-themed books, but I thought this was pretty different. The Buffyesque-ness of it probably sold the book to me since it's not often you meet a Buffy-like heroine.
ReplyDeleteYou have a valid point though on Ellie and Will's love - never thought about it that way, but I spent most of the novel wondering if Ellie and Will ever "hooked up" in the past lives - so the "oldness" of their love didn't bother me.
Thanks for the review - it makes me re-think my own reactions! :)
The epic rat - I've read a bunch of angle YA's lately, UNEARTHY was beautiful, but I've been underwhelmed by most of the recent ones. Without giving anything away, did you groan and the revelation at the end?
ReplyDeleteI had a few problems with this novel when I read it, but most of them weren't very big problems. Angelfire, over all, was pretty enjoyable.
ReplyDeleteTea and Tomes - That's kind of where I'm at too.
ReplyDelete