A Review!This contains spoilers and commentary on the entire series as whole, not just the third boo

A Review!This contains spoilers and commentary on the entire series as whole, not just the third book, so if you intend read the Angelfall series, you may want to skip this. For the rest of you, carry on (and for some of you scroll down to the bottom for a rant about plausibilty of angel wings)!I read this series both on a whim and for research purposes (checking out other things in my genre), and have fallen into a love/hate relationship with it. I’m going to be an outlier here, but I did not like the first book. The writing was simple, but not very tight and probably not as developed as it should have been for a published work (she got better, which I’m proud to see). Standard teenage heroine Penryn wasn’t much of a deviation from other YA girls of that ilk (though she would eventually grow, and in turn grow on me). Angelfall read like The Walking Dead with angels, and maybe it’s because I’m bored of the standard apocalypse story, but that’s what it was… up until I hit the 80 percent mark on the e-reader. From that point it deviated into something rather interesting – interesting enough to compel me to read the next book.World After read like a B-movie on the Sy Fy Channel: human experiments, strange scorpion hybrid creatures, wing surgery, angel parties and elections, etc., and I just went with it. It was a fun enough plot with a brisk enough pace that I didn’t find it hard to get through, and nothing was particularly grating.I have mixed feelings on the third book: End of Days. While, again, the plot was fun and the pacing was good (if not rushed), I felt there was a lot the book didn’t answer, and would have benefited from a longer manuscript. I wanted to know more than we got about Penryn’s mother and how she knew the things she did (angel things, and why were the hellions afraid of her? How did she know the eggs would work?). I wanted to know why the hell Gabriel lied about the things God said and what caused him to supposedly go “crazy”. I wanted to know how he actually died (other than he was shot and Uriel ordered it, though maybe it’s just me thinking bullets shouldn’t be able to kill angels…). I wanted to know why the angel invasion of Earth was even necessary in the first place. I wanted to know why Raffe gave the Pit Lord his own wings instead of just giving him Uriel’s. And on and on.Speaking of Uriel, I thought he was a lame villain. Not as lame as Valentine from The Mortal Instruments, but still pretty lame. I get he wasn’t a warrior; he was a politician, and knowing that one would think he’d have back-up plans for his back-up plans in case his whole election scheme fell through, but he didn’t. I guess I just wanted him to be more slimy than he already was and to outwit our protagonists more than he did. Give them a bit of a challenge, you know? His death was also fairly unsatisfying, as it only took a simple slash from Raffe to take him down. It was like swatting a fly, and reducing your villain to that makes him non-threatening.On a positive note, I’m glad Belial got some development and a decent death (and noble funeral), however I did want to see his character redeemed at the end of his arc, and Ee could have easily done that by having him choose to sacrifice himself for the sake of his friends, rather than have him just be the one to die because he was the portal in the future. Out of all of the characters in the series, he’s the only one I really, truly felt for. On that note, the journey to Hell segment of the book was batshit crazy and I loved it.I’ve read a few other reviews that expressed distate regarding how Obi’s death was handled. It was sudden, and he died to pass along the leadership role to Penryn, which would have been okay if there had been some more development leading up to that death. Maybe have Penryn return to the camp and decide to help Obi more than she did? Maybe have her take an interest in it beforehand? Obi’s death scene amounted to the standard “the teenage hero must save the day” trope in YA novels, and when I read it I just sighed. I didn’t see the point in killing him, especially when Penryn didn’t really want to lead the resistance in the first place. That whole trope of “those who don’t want power should have it because they won’t abuse it” is hogwash. People who haven’t been in leadership situations, and don’t want to be, probably won’t make very good leaders. Leadership comes from experience, and I found it hard to believe Penryn had that. At all.I liked the romantic developments for Penryn and Raffe for the most part. It was a slow build throughout the series, wasn’t eye-roll worthy, and wasn’t really creepy (though Penryn forcing Raffe to touch her boob while they slept after he clearly expressed he didn’t want to was not okay, at all). I did have an issue with Raffe suddenly realizing in this book that Gabriel was wrong about the Children of Man, and all of the “no I can’t be with a Daughter of Man” business in the second book was made moot. It was a really quick conclusion to the “will they be together?” question.And then there was the talent show. The talent show. It was the most ridiculous thing I’ve read in a climax for a story, and I loved it. It was a new kind of silly, and to me, pretty plausible given the characterization of Dee and Dum. The talent show was a planned event the twins had been working on, and it doesn’t surprise me they’d have gathered the necessary equipment to put it on. I thought the plan to use the speakers and lights against the angel’s senses was refreshing; a bit of strategy rather than fighting an enemy humans couldn’t hope to win against on a physical front. Yeah, it was pretty damn silly, but at the same time I get the notion of giving people some happiness before their (assumed) inevitable deaths.Was putting on the talent show the most intelligent move? Probably not, but it’s certainly far from the worst thing the author could have done, and I’m really not going to fault her for trying something different. It’s far better than having a climax where both parties gather for battle after assembling their best forces from all corners of the globe, are ready to tear each other apart, and then talk it out… and maybe see a vision of the future… and then go their separate ways, not leaving a single drop on the white snow that sparkles in the sun…As strange as the climax was, it wasn’t the part of the book that irked me. No, what irked me spanned through out the entire series: they way she handled wings. I never got a good idea of how big they were, but they were apparently small enough to hide in coats… without any human noticing them… at all. This is all hypothetical since angels don’t exist, but assume you wanted to give something with a humanoid body flight and make it somewhat plausible. Ee gives her angels hollow bones (or that’s what Penryn assumes, since they’re so light). This is one of the many things birds have to help them fly. They also have a skeletal structure more suited for the Maltese Cross (gliding pose), incredibly powerful pectoral muscles that make up a good portion of their body weight and keel bones to anchor them to. Now, having the muscle and bone structure required for flight would look both weird and hilarious on humanoids, so even if you’re going for semi-realism like Ee did, they’re probably not going to be depicted, and that’s fine. However, humanoids are not aerodynamic. Actually, humanoids are pretty clunky (and heavy), and to even make flight a remote possibility the wingspans of angels would have to be huge.To give you an idea (using males here, and not taking into account the % muscle mass per bird species), the bird with the largest wingspan is the wandering albatross, averaging around 10 feet with the high end being 12. Wandering albatross weigh an average of 20 lbs. So an 11 foot span to carry 20 lbs. The heaviest flying bird is the kori bustard, which can get to be almost 5 feet tall (hello there small bird person) on the high end and weigh in at 35 to 40 lbs. They have a wingspan between 7 and 9 feet. So an 8 foot wingspan to carry 37.5 lbs. For humans, the average male is around 180 lbs. Our bones make up 15 to 20% of our weight, so assuming the low end there at 15% we’re still talking a 153 lb person of unknown height. That’s still a ton of weight to carry around. Dr. Sam Poore, a hand surgeon who wrote this article, estimates for a 170 lb person a wingspan would have to be at least 20 feet, probably larger.My point is that you can’t hide a 20+ foot wingspan under a coat and expect people to not notice, and in these books, absolutely no one noticed. So either I just found a nice plot hole, or Ee made her angel wings too tiny to sustain flight in any reasonable manner which leaves open another. Yay for overthinking!I don’t think I can give the series a star rating; I just have too many mixed feelings about the books, however, I would recommend them to anyone who enjoys YA, angels, demons, B-movies, and all around strange things. Overall, they were fun reads. -Morgan -- source link
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