World After by Susan Ee

Title: World After
Author: Susan Ee
Publisher: Amazon - Skyscape
Rating: WARTY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!

Erratum:
On page 90 there’s an editorial note at the top of the page: “JARRING TEXT OF DIFFERENT SIZES]~~Ok as set - I'm guessing this shouldn't be there!

This is book two in the ‘Penryn & The End of Days’ series. I’m not a fan of series unless they’re done especially well, but I liked the first book, Angelfall which I reviewed in June, 2014, so I was quite pleased to have an opportunity to review the second. Unfortunately this sequel volume wasn't anywhere near as appealing. It felt like it was written by a different author. I could make it only half way through before I had to give up, having run out of Promethazine.

A big part of my nausea was caused by the first person PoV voice. It's far too self-important and self-obsessed unless it's done really well, and it was not done well here, not with this character, Penryn. You should read A Girl Called Al for an exemplary story in which this voice is used. Why authors - particularly YA authors - are so irremediably addicted to it is a complete and utter mystery to me, but I sincerely wish they would grow out of it.

The biggest problem with this novel is that it was boring. It went nowhere and offered nothing new - quite the contrary in fact since we were treated to a host of flashbacks via Penryn's magical video record and playback sword. I am not kidding you. Her angelic sword is a camcorder. It was bizarre, and I took to skipping entire sections which were nothing more than a rehash of book one, but told from the angel, Raffe's PoV. I care. Another filler employed here was 'Penryn dream world'. There was chapter after chapter offering nothing more than a simple recounting of Penryn's dreams, which were tedious. I took to skipping those, also. If these two things had been omitted the novel would probably have been only seventy-five percent the size it is.

Even when we weren't watching Sword Armchair Theater re-runs, or How Dream is My Valley, there was nothing of interest happening here, not for page after page after bleak page. The first seventy pages could have been half that long and still conveyed as much while saving precious trees. Penryn has literally come back from the dead courtesy of her friendly neighborhood angel Raffe, but life goes on as usual! Huh?

She now carries an angel sword, which only she can lift, but which she has no idea how to employ as a weapon. She’s been reunited with her slightly loopy mother and her kid sister Paige, but Paige is now some sort of zombie, having been experimented upon by the angels. She’s diminutive, yet very dangerous and threatening – like an attack dog, with her razor sharp teeth. Paige used to be a vegetarian, but now she’s hungry for meat, the raw and bloody kind, yet her sister sees nothing wrong with her, being devoted – so we’re told, not shown – to her mom and sister. Keep this in mind.

If you examine this story too closely, you'll realize it makes no sense, and in that it's not alone amongst angel stories. The reason for this is that most writers of angel stories have never actually read the Bible – or they've conveniently forgotten it or chosen to remember only tiny portions of it. They know neither what it is that angels do, nor what they’re actually there for. Essentially angels are errand boys. In naval terms, they would be an XO – an executive officer, carrying out the commands of the ship’s captain.

The problem with angel stories is that these characters are consistently depicted as soldiers fighting evil, a thing which they never were. They’re also uniformly endowed with wings. Typically these are white wings like swans have, but this is also a pure invention. They’re never described as having wings in the Bible. The winged ones are cherubim (the plural of cherub), but none of these YA writers ever talk about that! Cherub just doesn't quite carry the weight does it?

Now you recall where I told you that the author tells us how devoted Penryn is to her family? Well at one point, about eighty pages in, the community she’s with is attacked by the mutant scorpion creatures, first seen at the end of the previous volume. Flying mutant scorpion creatures which evidently buzz like bees. And have shaggy hair and lion’s teeth. And which drool and growl. Is there anything else with which we can lard them? No, I guess that’s all. Why these creatures are even needed is never revealed - at least not in the portion of this book I read. Maybe it was mentioned at the end of volume one, and I forgot.

Penryn’s young sister Paige – the one who is actually best equipped to fight enemies and to protect her family - runs off into the nearby forest. Her mom chases after Paige. Penryn, instead of automatically following them actually stands and debates whether she should stay with her family – the one to which she’s supposedly devoted - or run to the safety of the community and hide there. She chooses the latter. That was pretty much it for me. Penryn is not an heroic figure, not even mildly so. Please tell me, then, why I should care about her or root for her? I can't think of a single reason.

There’s a really oddball incident around page ninety after a scorpion attack where Penryn is trying to tell a doctor that these people who have been stung might not be dead. The Doctor is assuring her that if they don’t have a pulse they’re dead. This is in a world which has been devastated by an angelic insurgency, which has demons running around, and after an attack by mutant scorpion people, and this doctor thinks the old rules still apply? This is either bad writing, or this doctor is the biggest dick-head in history. As the comedian said (I forget this name, but it was probably Steven Wright): somewhere in the world is the world’s worst doctor. And you might have an appointment with him (or her!) tomorrow! I think we just met him.

The final straw, for me, came on page 142 where I read: “…three unarmed women surrounded by monsters…”. Why does it matter that they’re women? I have a real problem with what I can only view as misogyny, especially when it;s penned by a female writer. Is this really what we want to teach our young women - that if you're a woman you're somehow more threatened by these monsters than you would be if you were a guy? Because this is no different from telling girls that women are weak, that they're helpless, that they're prey in need of a guardian angel. It's pathetic, particularly from a female author, and I refuse to subscribe to abuses like that. I will not recommend this novel.

Angelfall by Susan Ee

Title: Angelfall
Author: Susan Ee
Publisher: Amazon Children's Publishing
Rating: worthy

p132 there's a paragraph which begins "I wonder…" and ends with "…out cringing." which appears to be printed in a different font from everything else. It may be an optical illusion, but it looks darker, and the letters appear to be jammed closer together than those in the surrounding paragraphs. It just looked odd to me!
p223 "…lingering scent of burn paper." should be "…lingering scent of burned paper." presumably

I am not an 'angel' novel fan. After reading the god-awfully atrocious Lauren Kate crap, I decided that was more than enough for a lifetime. Female authors seem handicapped, for some reason, in relating dystopian stories (with some notable and most welcome exceptions), and they're so wooden-headedly addicted to first person young-female PoV that's it’s gone beyond ridiculous into parody.

These novels robotically insult womanhood rather than portray it realistically and engagingly, by rendering their characters into weak and helpless children and pawns of the male "love interest". It’s disgusting to read, but now and then I come across a novel (and much more rarely, a series) which is an exception to the rule.

This is book one of the Penryn & the End of days series, and it wasn't even on my radar. I came across it by accident, and was glad I did. The blurb sounded interesting. We know that blurbs routinely lie, but as it turned out, and despite being a dystopian novel told in first person by a teen female character, this novel was not actually nauseating, believe it or not. Yes, it was larded with trope and cliché, but the author had put just enough alternative material into it to separate it from the pack, and this is why I rate it a worthy read.

Penryn Young lives at a time on Earth, roughly in the present, where literally out of the blue, angels have descended and wrought havoc on humanity and upon its institutions and constructs. North America lies in ruins, and society has gone to hell. The only way to survive is to live in hiding, or to join a militia or a gang. No one seems to be able to fight back, and this was the first problem I had with this novel.

Yes, I get that we’re joining a story in progress, when all the worst damage has been done, and we’re looking at survivors and the aftermath, but we get no back-story whatsoever to explain how a relative handful of angels armed only with swords(!) could have rained down so much destruction. Where were the police? Where was the military? Where was the air force to take on these flying beings? These angels are shown to be mortal and vulnerable, so how did they manage to achieve so overwhelming a victory, and in so short a time? Crickets chirping.

Penryn is moving with her schizophrenic mother, who is off her meds, and her younger sister Paige, who is wheelchair bound - a condition in which her mother, during one of her delusional episodes, may have put her. Or may not. They're heading for the hills, quite literally. They can do this only at night because the gangs and the angels rule the city during the day, although why this is, is never explained. Angels see well in the dark, we’re told, so their absence after dark makes no sense.

Anyway, as Penryn and Co travel the streets, an angel falls onto the roof of a vehicle nearby. From their hiding place, they see five other angels alight, and a fight ensues between these beings, during which the injured angel's wings are severed. When the other angels depart, leaving their victim to bleed out, they take Penryn's sister with them. I had some issues with this scene, too, but I'll let those go.

Penryn realizes that the only way she will find her sister again is if she keeps this angel alive long enough for him to tell her where her sister was taken, and so begins an uneasy alliance. Penryn's mom is now very conveniently AWOL, and although she's never far away, she's never with them in any meaningful sense either, so this bald artifice allows the rest of the novel to be pretty much just the Penryn and the angel, on a road trip. The deal is that she will help him to get his wings sewn back on, if he helps her to find her sister. Yes, sewn back on - this is how the supernaturals operate! That part made no sense either. These are supernatural beings but they have to resort to catgut, curved needles, and antibiotic shots?!

Penryn is a bit of a dumb-ass, too. It becomes patently obvious that there's something seriously wrong with the behavior of these angels, yet Penryn never figures this out. It’s obvious that there are good angels and bad ones, but Penryn blindly believes that they're all the same, and you know what? She's actually right on the money because every last one of the angels behaves like teen boys from the US!

This was probably the most serious issue I had with this novel: Penryn constantly reminds herself (and us) that this is an angel she's with. He's not human, we're told repeatedly, yet he behaves at all times exactly like a young human male, and he speaks at all times like an American teen. All the angels behave like humans. Towards the end of the novel, when Penryn visits San Francisco, the angel HQ, she finds them partying in a nightclub! This made zero sense to me, and it’s really sad, because it’s the most shallow and brain-dead part of this bizarre trope in YA supernatural fiction whereby the supernatural characters have these truly exotic traits - they're vampires, or werewolves, or angels, or demons - yet they behave EXACTLY like teen boys and girls. Barf!

In their introductory phase, her angel, with whom she is falling in love for no reason whatsoever that we’re party to, announces that his name as Raffe (Rah-fee) and it’s obvious that this is the archangel Raphael, although Penryn isn’t smart enough to figure that out for herself. It’s obvious he's not a bad guy, although his manners leave something to be desired, yet she continues to rail against him and his kind in her internal monologues.

So why did I even like this novel?! That's a very good question, and here's the answer: despite all the juvenile trope and the wrong-headedness in portraying these angels, the author does not overdo it with the romance, and she introduces some really cool ideas. She makes the relationship take time and develop organically. Yes, ultimately, it’s bizarre and too much, but it's not forced, which I appreciated. She writes a strong female character in Penryn, who is both tough and weak, both strong and flawed, and is quite endearing and interesting, if a bit stupid, but she's also wonderful in her devotion to her mother and her sister, who continue to be her main focus throughout.

In addition to this, the plot is interesting and develops in ways that were unexpected and intriguing, especially towards the end when she finally locates her sister. Ee brings some cool new ideas to the world of angels even as she portrays the angels stereotypically, and she ends the novel in a way that's satisfying for this volume whilst leaving some things sufficiently open for the next in the series. I'm particularly intrigued by what happened to her sister, and it's really for that reason that I want to read volume 2. So I recommend this one!