Fallen
For Luce Price, the darkness is a thing to fear. After a tragedy that lands her in the boarding school Sword & Cross in Savannah, Georgia, Luce finds herself drawn to the eerily familiar Daniel Grigori. As Daniel pushes her away, keeping her at a distance, making it painfully clear that he wants nothing to do with her, Luce persists. She knows that there is a secret tied with this feeling and is determined to figure it out – even if it kills her.
This novel was absolutely gripping, but there was one big problem – Luce was too perfect. Everyone who met her instantly took a liking to her, either as a friend or as a romantic interest. All the while, she fawns over Daniel, the one guy who spends most of the novel playing tug of war, first pushing her away, then pulling her close before pushing her away again. She wasn’t the most in-depth character, but there is one thing that works in her favour. She is still one hundred times better than Isabella Swan, for the one reason that she has a personality far from one dimensional. The other characters who are represented by her point of view are more captivating and more fun, but it’s all the scenes where she is with another character that we get to see a soft side of her, a benevolent side that makes her likable.
The storytelling was wonderfully done, starting out as just a normal young adult novel with a normal adolescent, but then it blooms into something more. Darkness creeps into story, little by little. The strong religious aspect of the fallen angels represented in the novel displays a brilliant story.
The theme following the fallen angels from Heaven has become incredibly popular in YA fiction as of late. While the popularity rises, Kate finds a way to make her work stand out. She has the talent of a writer and while she needs to work on giving her protagonist more personality, the dynamic between the characters is well done. She also has a knack for detail and description. The scenes, brilliantly detailed, ground the reader in not only where the story takes place and where the characters are, but also highlighting the mysterious and spooky shadows that creep into her peripheral, causing chaos and death in their wake.
By Lauren Kate
