Fallen and Torment
Jul. 7th, 2012 07:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calzephyrSo now that insecure young women with moody supernatural boyfriends are a Thing, I finally got around to reading Lauren Kate's Fallen series. I do believe I saw it mentioned on ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
yalitlovers and the books are overall very good. Two more books, Passion and Rapture round out the series.
So far the the books follow a formula common to the genre - young teenage girl confused about which guy she loves, but she's not as much of a navel gazer as Bella Swan. In fact, the emo "Who do I chooooose?" is kept to a nice minimum and instead Kate moves the action along as Lucinda tries to figure out her past and just what is up with all the cliquey people at her reform school.
Poor Lucinda. We meet her as a fallen sort of person herself at a reform school called Sword and Cross in Georgia. She's been sent there because she accidentally killed a boy she liked - they kiss and poof! up in smoke he went. If this sounds just weird or trashy, Kate pulls it off in a most believable way. There is a lot of handwaving in these two books, but the endings are worth brushing it aside.
Now, the big hint about the supernatural element is in the title. I don't know enough about the Old Testament or scholarly biblical stuff to say how true most of the ideas are presented, but it's an interesting one compared to vampires and werewolves. The angel theme carries a lot more weight anyway.
And Kate just knows how to make a heart sigh for the sexy angel dudes. It was much hotter than anything Stephanie Meyer could come up with, anyway.
Lucinda doesn't realize that she's doomed to die every 17 years until it's finally explained to her. She re-incarnates as someone else each time.
One of the best characters in Fallen also sadly gets knocked off at the end. I was so crushed! Not the nerdy best friend! The last few chapters had me glued as a vast conspiracy worked itself out.
Torment is the sequel, and I feel it's a little misnamed. Certainly it's not torment for the reader. Rather, it refers to Daniel's torment for not being able to tell Lucinda about her past. It's something she must discover on her own. It was hard to know what direction the book would take after the big reveal in the first book.
Now that the big secret is out and Lucinda's life is in danger, Daniel whisks her off to California to another boarding school that is loaded with angelic beings. While she's only there for 18 days (each chapter is a day) it sounds like Lucinda is there for a month.
It seems another characteristic of the moody supernatural boyfriend is to be a controlling jerk, and Daniel does a poor job of explaining to Lucinda why she must stay on the school grounds or what she needs to be protected from. This lack of communication has all sorts of consequences, as one can imagine. Lucinda even takes a liking to another angel boy because she's confused about her feelings for Daniel. Oh no!
The blend of romance, supernatural and mystery is one that Kate handles well for the most part. Besides the supernatural love theme, the series do a great job of normalizing the often confusing, messy lives teenagers can have. Lucinda's frustration at being kept in the dark is not unlike all the information adults withhold from young people. I often think the supernatural boyfriend is merely a parent stand-in since parents are mostly absent in young adult books.
For all the areas I could take issue with though, the one that oddly irritated me were the travel parts. It sounds like Kate either travelled via the Internet or didn't pay attention to a lot of details if she did visit places.
For example, Lucinda and her friends travel through a portal to Las Vegas and end up in the Mirage. The Mirage doesn't have coin slots. They bump into a supernatural friend who takes them to an IHOP. The nearest IHOP in walking distance is at least an hour walking from the Mirage. And in one of her past lives, Lucinda finds she lived in a snowy Canadian cabin with her older sister. Argh! Please lady, I can believe that Lucinda is doomed every 17 years, but I can't believe these details :-D
yalitlovers and the books are overall very good. Two more books, Passion and Rapture round out the series. So far the the books follow a formula common to the genre - young teenage girl confused about which guy she loves, but she's not as much of a navel gazer as Bella Swan. In fact, the emo "Who do I chooooose?" is kept to a nice minimum and instead Kate moves the action along as Lucinda tries to figure out her past and just what is up with all the cliquey people at her reform school.
Poor Lucinda. We meet her as a fallen sort of person herself at a reform school called Sword and Cross in Georgia. She's been sent there because she accidentally killed a boy she liked - they kiss and poof! up in smoke he went. If this sounds just weird or trashy, Kate pulls it off in a most believable way. There is a lot of handwaving in these two books, but the endings are worth brushing it aside.
Now, the big hint about the supernatural element is in the title. I don't know enough about the Old Testament or scholarly biblical stuff to say how true most of the ideas are presented, but it's an interesting one compared to vampires and werewolves. The angel theme carries a lot more weight anyway.
And Kate just knows how to make a heart sigh for the sexy angel dudes. It was much hotter than anything Stephanie Meyer could come up with, anyway.
Lucinda doesn't realize that she's doomed to die every 17 years until it's finally explained to her. She re-incarnates as someone else each time.
One of the best characters in Fallen also sadly gets knocked off at the end. I was so crushed! Not the nerdy best friend! The last few chapters had me glued as a vast conspiracy worked itself out.
Torment is the sequel, and I feel it's a little misnamed. Certainly it's not torment for the reader. Rather, it refers to Daniel's torment for not being able to tell Lucinda about her past. It's something she must discover on her own. It was hard to know what direction the book would take after the big reveal in the first book.
Now that the big secret is out and Lucinda's life is in danger, Daniel whisks her off to California to another boarding school that is loaded with angelic beings. While she's only there for 18 days (each chapter is a day) it sounds like Lucinda is there for a month.
It seems another characteristic of the moody supernatural boyfriend is to be a controlling jerk, and Daniel does a poor job of explaining to Lucinda why she must stay on the school grounds or what she needs to be protected from. This lack of communication has all sorts of consequences, as one can imagine. Lucinda even takes a liking to another angel boy because she's confused about her feelings for Daniel. Oh no!
The blend of romance, supernatural and mystery is one that Kate handles well for the most part. Besides the supernatural love theme, the series do a great job of normalizing the often confusing, messy lives teenagers can have. Lucinda's frustration at being kept in the dark is not unlike all the information adults withhold from young people. I often think the supernatural boyfriend is merely a parent stand-in since parents are mostly absent in young adult books.
For all the areas I could take issue with though, the one that oddly irritated me were the travel parts. It sounds like Kate either travelled via the Internet or didn't pay attention to a lot of details if she did visit places.
For example, Lucinda and her friends travel through a portal to Las Vegas and end up in the Mirage. The Mirage doesn't have coin slots. They bump into a supernatural friend who takes them to an IHOP. The nearest IHOP in walking distance is at least an hour walking from the Mirage. And in one of her past lives, Lucinda finds she lived in a snowy Canadian cabin with her older sister. Argh! Please lady, I can believe that Lucinda is doomed every 17 years, but I can't believe these details :-D
