Angelfall by Susan Ee

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.

I heard about this book from a beauty guru on youtube. I was already at the point in time where I was starting to twitch because I haven't been reading and I felt like I needed something to keep me busy and something to go to as a sort of release. So, I picked up Angelfall on audible and started to listen to it while I was cleaning the apartment and such. I never really experimented before with audiobooks, and damn are some of them expensive for really no reason (I feel), but I decided to go ahead and give this a try and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It's like a movie where you get to hear the characters voice and their expressions rather than keying them to your own ideas and the way that you'd want the characters to react or sound in a certain moment. It made the experience all the more intriguing.

I thought that the story progressed well and had some really interesting details as far as how the Angels work and the way they run their community, to the absolute horrors of their reign and what they are trying to produce to kill of mankind. 

Penryn is strongwilled and smart. She looks after her younger sister not only because shes her sibling, but because her mother is a basket case with paranoid schizophrenia and her sister is in a wheelchair. So really, everything falls on her to make sure that they find the food and shelter that they need to survive. One thing that threw me off with their whole family dynamic was the mother. In the beginning of the book she is definitely unreliable and very much in her own thoughts. At one point she disappears for a good amount of time, but when she gets reintroduced into the story, I could only feel awkward and confused as to the situation and what was going on. It never really gets explained, or at least from her own mouth, it just sort of gets thought out through Penryn who sort of makes an excuse for her. I just felt that there really was no need to reintroduce the mother back into the story, she didn't really serve a purpose to the storyline at that point anymore. I feel that if there was more background on her mental condition and why she even thinks about things so obsessively would make more sense for the story and he part in it.

I wouldn't say there was really a love plot going on, for it was very concealed and sort of pushed off to the side, which was actually quite nice. The story mainly progresses by forming the relationship between Raffe and Penryn as not so much a friendship but as a reliance and an agreement. So even though it's constantly in the back of your mind that something may happen or maybe something else is going on, it's never so obvious that it takes away from what's really important to the story and to the characters. Obviously, it's not hard to see that eventually some form of love will form between them and the story overall will evolve into something based on their relationship as a romantic one, but for this book, it simply rests on their mutual goal.

I honestly love their relationship as it is. I never felt like there needed to be more or less as far as how they acted towards one another or showed to each other. There was a good sense of give and take between them which makes reading their relationship grow entertaining and fun. They have really good banter amongst themselves and although it's a serious situation with death, violent killings and craziness all around, they never take each other too seriously. It helps to lighten the mood and keep the reading at a good pace.

Overall I think the plot of this story is something that is interesting and new. I personally really love the idea of Angels being sent down to Earth to essentially destroy it. I'm not an overly religious person, but religion, faith and mythology intrigue me, and this concept makes me giddy to an extent that others might find unnecessary. I would personally add this to my list of tops reads and overall favorites simply based on the concept and storyline. It just really bothers me that the subplot of the mother isn't explained or explored much. Hopefully the next books do her a little more justice!





Thanks for reading this! I posted it but it wasn't finished and I went ahead and re-read the book to get a new and refreshed perspective on it.