REVIEW by @AmberLNatusch: Angelfall by Susan Ee (@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.

So before I write this review, I want to start by saying how I rate a book. Anything below a 3/5 is a bad sign and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. A 3 or 3.5, especially if it’s in a series, is high enough that I would read the next book, but it had better be an improvement or I’m gone. A 4/5 means I really liked it and would enthusiastically recommend it to others. A 5/5 means I was completely cracked out on it, which essentially means I ignore everything going on around me. I don’t eat. I don’t sleep. I do nothing of consequence until the story ends. My husband dreads me finding a 5/5.
I chose to read this book because it kept popping up everywhere I found my own novel. If you’re like me, you can only see something so many times before your curiosity gets the best of you. After reading the description and reviews, I decided to purchase it and try to fit it in around my stretches of editing my second novel. My editing came to a grinding halt.
The author had me at hello. I can’t seem to put my finger on what it is that she does so well, but I’m pretty certain that a bomb could have gone off outside my house and I wouldn’t have noticed a thing. Whatever you want to call the gift she has, she’s got it in spades. Without being overly verbose, you understand exactly where you are, what’s going on, how it looks, and most importantly, how you should feel. Penryn’s back story is brilliantly revealed both slowly and cleverly, making you fully understand why she does what she does and how she finds the strength to do it. And she carries a mighty load, indeed.
There is power in words, and many authors have found a way to harness that power beautifully. What many of them lack is the ability to find power in what isn’t said. Susan is masterful when in comes to the art of implication, and I, for one, think that style possesses far more disturbing and off-putting qualities that can drive the foreboding undertones in a novel that calls for it. This one certainly did. Mission accomplished.
The story was unique, interesting, and oftentimes hard to stomach. The subject matter is intense (as I’m assuming the apocalypse would warrant), but moving, and I find it hard to think that anyone who is close to their sibling/siblings wouldn’t find a certain level of kinship with Penryn because of it. Her fierce loyalty combined with her stubbornness drive her to do the unthinkable – walk into almost certain death. Thankfully she doesn’t have to attempt the task alone, having allied with an injured angel, Raffe.
Now, I’m a die hard lover of love. If there is any undercurrent of it in a book, I tend to be a happy camper. I especially liked the budding affections between these two for a couple of reasons. Firstly, they’re technically doomed from the start, and who doesn’t love a good challenge, right? Secondly, it’s so believable. They way they act toward each other from beginning to end is completely understandable, realistic, and human. I found it extremely uplifting for some odd reason, given that the rest of the story wasn’t exactly filled with rainbows, kittens and sunshine. Those things probably don’t fit well into a post-apocalyptic world though, do they?
I find myself anxious to read the next novel in the series, and have harassed the author to find out when exactly that might be. Look for the follow up some time this summer.
Angelfall gets a VERY enthusiastic 5/5!
Click here to get your copy of Angelfall from Amazon.com!