Review: Angelfall by Susan Ee

Angelfall by Susan Ee

Published: May 21st, 2011
Acquired: Purchased from Amazon
Format: Kindle edition
Overall: ½

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

My thoughts:
I know you've read gushing review after gushing review of this book. And you may be tired of them. No worries. No gushing review here.
Before I write this, I'll say that dystopian/post-apocalyptic genre is just not  my cup of tea. They have so much premise and possibility and you have to have a very imaginative mind to read them, and I love that... but I just can't always get into them. And that's why I've made March my Dystopian challenge month, just to hopefully find one that I do love.

I didn't hate this book. I actually really really liked it, but for the most part I was just feeling "eh" towards it.
From the beginning this book was fast paced and just kept going, that's obviously what the author was going for and it had purpose. Penryn (that name...) and Raffe needed to gogogo to stay out of harms way and cover ground as she looks for her sister and tries to find a way to get his wings "sewn" back on.
The encounters they come acorss on their way to the Aerie were, for the most part, boring for me. I didn't get attached to the characters and I didn't much care for what happened to them at this part.
But then they finally get to the Aerie that's where the book picked up for me, and I found myself perking up, ready for more. But unfortunately, it was also the shortest part of the book. That's the beauty and sucky part of climaxes in stories.
I loved that, because this book is a self-pub, that Susan Ee was able to write and have no filter (read: editor) telling her she can't write that. And that all comes in with the climax. I was disturbed, heart-broken and angry with a lot of what happened there and because of that, I would give this book 5 stars, but I couldn't forget the beginning.
With the way the book ended, it made me want more, so I'll definitely be reading the next book in the series. Though I'm not necessarily dying to read it. I did add it to my "to-reads" shelf on Goodreads anyways.

So, in the end, I applaud Susan Ee for having such a successful, self-published book. And if you don't have a Kindle, it's now available in paperback! :)

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Author Info:
Susan Ee is the author of Angelfall (Penryn & the End of Days, Book 1). Her short stories have been in various publications including Realms of Fantasy and The Dragon and the Stars anthology. She is also a filmmaker whose latest film played at major film festivals and on cable TV stations throughout the U.S. She studied creative writing through workshops at Stanford, The Iowa Writers' Workshop and Clarion West.
Find more on her: website | twitter | goodreads | facebook | google+