NetGalley sent me an email a few weeks ago to catch up on this series before the final book comes out in May. I'll be honest: I deleted the email because the synopsis sounded a little too close to home:
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 Raffe, an injured enemy angel. Traveling through a dark and twisted Northern California, they journey toward the angels’ stronghold in San Francisco, where Penryn will risk everything to rescue her sister and Raffe will put himself at the mercy of his greatest enemies for the chance to be made whole again.
So I set it aside. I ignored it. Then Amazon started sending me emails about it. Then NetGalley again. It felt like the world was telling me, Read this book, Seriously. And you know what? Thank you, world, because I finally did and...wow. Penryn is awesome. She's brave and loyal and heartbreakingly loving. Her entire family is screwed: her younger sister, Paige, is in a wheelchair, and their mother has seen demons her entire life, demons that make her do terrible things. The humans that populate this book range from helpful to crazed, and they all seem to find their way into the Resistance camp, along with the leader Obi, plus the twins Dee-Dum, who I absolutely fell in love with. The angels in this book are nothing more than glorified frat boys, partying it up while humans die around them and the world crumbles. They don't care about humans, except when they want to use them as decorations. But then there's Raphael, or Raffe. He's cold and ruthless and sometimes funny, but he has standards and he sticks to them, much to the disgust of this reader. It was terrible reading about (slight spoiler?) how his wings were cut from him, and the end, the end! No one should be subjected to what Raffe and Paige go through. The description of the dilapidated cities were strangely beautiful, and it really hit my heart because it was set in Silicon Valley and San Francisco, my old backyard. To read about the skyscrapers falling to the ground and the entire Bay Area being nothing more than an angel playground...it hurt!
Lucky for me, instead of having to wait so many thousands of years for the sequel, I was granted permission to read both of them at the same time! SO right after I finished Angelfall, I started World After:
In this sequel to the bestselling fantasy thriller, Angelfall, the survivors of the angel apocalypse begin to scrape back together what's left of the modern world. When a group of people capture Penryn's sister Paige, thinking she's a monster, the situation ends in a massacre. Paige disappears. Humans are terrified. Mom is heartbroken.
Penryn drives through the streets of San Francisco looking for Paige. Why are the streets so empty? Where is everybody? Her search leads her into the heart of the angels' secret plans, where she catches a glimpse of their motivations, and learns the horrifying extent to which the angels are willing to go.
Meanwhile, Raffe hunts for his wings. Without them, he can't rejoin the angels, can't take his rightful place as one of their leaders. When faced with recapturing his wings or helping Penryn survive, which will he choose?
I don't want to spoil anything, but let's just say that Paige is a little different than when Penryn lost her at the beginning of book one. She's not...herself. Neither is Raffe. He got some wings, but they're not the ones that he wanted. After escaping the Resistance camp, Penryn, Paige, and their mom are on the run, trying to find somewhere they can go, until Paige disappears. Now they're searching for her, and when Raffe steps in to help Penryn, things become a lot...well, not smoother, but a bit easier? Either way, those two need to stop already and just smash their faces together, whether or not Raffe thinks mixing with a Daughter of Man is bad or not. He wants to face battle just as much as Penryn does. We also learn a bit more about Uriel, the politician that's in the running to become Messenger, since Gabriel was murdered six weeks earlier. Always Uriel, I kid you not. But now Penryn and Raffe have some new "friends" and none of them are going down without a fight. This book was exciting and stuffed full of information, which made it the perfect sequel. There's still questions to be answered, so I'm eagerly anticipating the third one!
Unfortunately, we all have to wait another month and a half until the third one comes out, so that's not cool. It's okay, though, because these books didn't just give me entertainment, they gave me ideas. That's for Friday, though. It'll be a massively long post about the future of my writing, so be prepared!
Now all I can picture are the Nazi hyenas in The Lion King. Great.
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