Graveyard Shift, by Angela Roquet

1 star

Lana is a Reaper, living in Limbo City, making a living collecting souls on their deaths and delivering them to whatever Afterlife suits them best - it turns out that all religions were sorta right, you see, and so their believers are simply measured against their own beliefs before being ferried on to Heaven/Hell/Nirvana/Summerland etc. Unless they're unbelievers, in which case they're thrown into the Sea of Eternity. 

Despite not being a very good Reaper - she breaks rules, is insubordinate, lazy and generally a pain in the ass - Lana has somehow just been given a promotion. Grim, the boss of the Reapers, wants her to head a crew looking for a particularly special soul who can hold Eternity together.

This initially appealed to me because of its ideas, but unfortunately fell flat in the telling. We jump from plot point to plot point with most of the contents feeling like ideas for scenes and characters not yet fleshed out, and neither the relationships (be they the apparently romantic one that springs up between Lana and an angel she supposedly despises, or those with her friends and peers) nor the plot points felt remotely organic but simply appeared because Roquet wanted them to. Description wasn't a strong suit either, so I was left with only a vague sense of what this world looked and felt like, what happened in the battles that frequently kicked off, and no clue whatsoever why both Lana and the soul she was looking for were so ruddy bloody special.

On the plus side, this was free...

Daughter of Smoke and Bone, by Laini Taylor

3 stars

Daughter of Smoke and Bone is exactly the sort of book title that makes my fingers want to start flinging cash at book stores. Add that everyone and their aunt seems to have had a fit of the wibbles when it comes to this trilogy, and you can easily see why I’ve finally succumbed.

The mysterious Karou is a 17 year-old art student, studying in Prague. Her hair grows blue, her tattoos are ever changing, and she claims the fantastical characters that populate the pages of her notebooks are her family. She’s not lying, either. Frequently disappearing on errands for Brimstone, the chimaera wishmonger who’s raised her as his own, Karou isn’t really sure what happens with all of the teeth she’s sent to collect. Nor is she sure how the wishes she’s always using have come to be. But when mysterious black handprints start appearing on the doors to Elsewhere, the place she was raised, and Karou comes face to face with an angel apparently set on killing her, she’s set on a path where she’ll not only find the answers to these questions, but that of who she really is.

I absolutely adored the first half of this book – Taylor writes beautifully and imbues her world with a fairytale magic that is hard to resist. I loved the chimaera and the idea of magical currency, and the settings were also imbued with a fantastical, romantic air. Sadly, that wasn’t to last, and as soon as Karou came eye to cartoon-heart-filled eye with the angel Akiva, a little of the magic was lost for me. As the setting of the story got more fantastic and we found out more about Elsewhere, Karou’s back story and the centuries long war between the chimaera and the seraphim, what should have sent me spinning off into the stratosphere with the awesomeness of it all (a heroine with horns and bat-wings? Hell, yeah!) soon had me plummeting into another-sodding-romance annoyance as the love story took over as the primary focus.

It’s probably my fault as the reader for not properly reading the synopsis or any reviews before plunging in, as it’s certainly not Taylor’s writing which, as I said, is beautiful. Given another story (with less focus on romance) I could even become a bit of a fan. It’s just not going to be this story.

Angelfall, by Susan Ee

4 stars

You can usually guarantee that when you pick up a book starring angels, it's going to be lame. As such, and having bought Angelfall for less than a quid, I came to this with seriously low expectations (seriously. After nearly suffering an aneurysm through violent eye-rolling when reading Hush, Hush, and even starting to think that Anne Rice was shit while reading Angel Time, the bar had been set so low you'd have had to start digging to find it). I settled back, relaxed, and prepared to snark and snigger my way through...only to find myself tearing through the book in two sittings with nary an eyeroll and harbouring a secret regret that I'd spunked away book money on the rest of the disappointing Divergent series and therefore wouldn't be able to justify immediately buying the rest of this to my despairing boyfriend (who has just spent months decluttering our flat and could really do without more books already, thank you).

Penryn is a teenage girl in a post-apocalyptic world - one that's been annihilated by angels. It seems Judgement Day has been and gone and the human race been found wanting. In the aftermath of the devastation, survivors not only need to avoid the uber-violent angels still patrolling the skies but human gangs and scavengers too, as well as trying not to become one of the growing number of bodies found gnawed upon by teeth that aren't those of animals.

Penryn is already something of a survivor - she's had to be. With a paranoid schizophrenic mother and a disabled younger sister, Penryn's long taken on the responsibility of taking care of her family. She's also taken virtually every type of self-defence class imaginable, signed up by a mother terrified that Penryn could be the subject of an attack by her own hand. This is going to come in handy from now on, especially after her sister is abducted by angels. To track her down, Penryn must form an unlikely alliance with the angel Raffe, saved by Penryn after being attacked by his own kind and left wingless and dying in the street.

Building a brilliant post-apocalyptic world that doesn't shy away from being horrific when it needs to, starring a heroine that's feisty and funny and lacking inexplicable powers, and a take on angels that I really appreciated (these aren't beings of aching goodness but a bunch of dicks, who amusingly aren't really even sure God exists but would jump off a cliff if Gabriel told them to. Not that jumping off a cliff would affect them in any way what with the wings and all, but you get the drift). There's no insta-love and, although the central relationship between Penryn and Raffe is clearly building towards something more romantic, it's a slow-burner that doesn't feel the need for constant melodramatic pronouncements as well as managing the astonishing feat of only making me 'ugh' once.

Well played, Susan Ee, well played!

The Don't Bother Bin: Hush, Hush

1 star (read in Sept 2010)

This one well and truly proves the old adage that you can't judge a book by its cover as the one on this is truly gorgeous, whereas the contents are some of the lamest writing I have ever read. I shall try to avoid slipping into a rant, but judging by the way this book had me yelling at it every five seconds like a deranged person I can't make any promises.

Borrowing heavily from Twilight including meeting via partnerdom in bio class, rescue from danger in Portland (what is it with Portland?) and a heroine whom everyone inexplicably sees as intelligent when she actually displays the IQ of a stone, this is the tale of Nora Grey, a girl with the power to make fallen angels abandon their plans of murder and fall in love with her instead simply by being an apparently schizophrenic, blushing and spluttering moron. The angel, Patch (kudos on the sexy name there, doesn't at all put me in mind of a small, yappy dog) apparently has eyes that 'didn't play by the rules' (what, they smell instead of see? Or are they Marty Feldman-esque?)

Patch (snigger) is meant to come across as a sexy bad boy, but instead comes off as a psychotic creep in desperate need of a shoeing - and this is coming from somebody who was desperately in love (lust) with 90% of the population of HBO's Oz (ahhh, Ryan O'Reilly...now that's how you do a sexy bad boy).

The writing and plot is as bitty and all over the shop as Nora's personality, with events cropping up and characters making decisions that are wildly implausible even within a story set amongst the supernatural, functioning merely to get us to the next 'plot' point. Amongst the many, many things that irked me are:

* Coach, the bio teacher, making Patch and Nora tell the class what they look for in a potential mate, simply so we can shoehorn in some sexual tension. Shut up Coach, and behave like a teacher actually would.

* Nora taking iron pills in front of Patch, while thinking her anemia is her vulnerable secret and that she should try to keep him from finding out. 

* This is an 'intelligent' girl, remember, and yet we have her walking down a dark alley in a scary neighbourhood during a freezing cold night and trading her hat and coat (with her phone in the pocket) with a homeless person in exchange for directions, simply so we can shoehorn in another mistaken identity attack.

* Nora instantly wearing less make-up the moment Patch tells her she should, and continuing to spend time with him even though she's mostly ultra-paranoid and terrified of him because, after all, he's hot. Next she'll be cutting herself off from all her friends and excusing her black eyes because it just shows how much he loves her really.

* After beating Patch's chest with her fists we have him telling her that, having seen her moves, he's sure she can take the angel of death that's after her. Angels of death are either nowhere near as badass as they sound, or their Kryptonite is being punched in the tits. Don't try and make us believe that our heroine can defend herself when you've actually only shown us that she is completely incapable.

* After spending most of the book thinking Patch is trying to kill her, he confesses to both wanting to and nearly doing so twice already. In return she strokes his scars.

On the plus side, my edition had a strange habit of sometimes replacing the y's on the end of words with a ). This led to the best moment of the entire book, when Patch told Nora:

You're getting cock).

Childish, but awesome.