There are fallen angels, and then there is ANGELFALL

Angelfall
By: Susan Ee
Reported by: Julianna Helms

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.

-Summary from Goodreads
Barnes & Noble||Amazon

Angelfall is a disturbingly gruesome, extravagantly visual, and terrifyingly bloody, addictive story.

This was one of those books that I read based on hype and endless recommendations alone. So you must sense, or perhaps even understand, my disappointment when I ended up disliking it.

I must admit that I'm a slightly squeamish person. In fact, I never watch horror movies. So if that's the complete opposite of you, I think you'd love this book. Alas, enamored and terrified do not synchronize in my case, and there's nothing I can do about that but embrace it. In truth, I greatly enjoyed the first three quarters of Angelfall. The action was thriller-paced, the characters realistically flawed, and such an ambitious story robbed my breath away.

But the book's also weird. Really, really weird. Weirder than fish-with-neon-purple-feet-and-wings weird. And though I was fine with the grotesqueness in the beginning, it reached a point where I just... felt like throwing up. (But I didn't. Thank goodness.)

If you can stand reading about a child tearing and eating angel flesh, well, this book is as available as they come. But if the very thought churns your stomach, maybe something else would be more suitable.

Overall, Angelfall is a horrific-in-content, terrific-in-writing (it actually resonates the prose of Suzanne Collins) novel that will definitely click with something in you.

Whether it's a good or bad feeling, though... well, as they always say: That, you'll have to see for yourself.

Waiting on Wednesday {23}

This week, I'm waiting on...

What is truly HALLOWED

Hallowed
By: Cynthia Hand
Reported by: Julianna Helms

For months part-angel Clara Gardner trained to face the raging forest fire from her visions and rescue the alluring and mysterious Christian Prescott from the blaze. But nothing could prepare her for the fateful decisions she would be forced to make that day, or the startling revelation that her purpose—the task she was put on earth to accomplish—is not as straightforward as she thought.

Now, torn between her increasingly complicated feelings for Christian and her love for her boyfriend, Tucker, Clara struggles to make sense of what she was supposed to do the day of the fire. And, as she is drawn further into the world of part angels and the growing conflict between White Wings and Black Wings, Clara learns of the terrifying new reality that she must face: Someone close to her will die in a matter of months. With her future uncertain, the only thing Clara knows for sure is that the fire was just the beginning. 

-Summary from Goodreads
Barnes&Noble||Amazon||The Book Depository

Hallowed is like volcanic ash. It's not at all what it appears to be at first glance. It's this giant, restless, horribly beautiful substance raining down and destroying everything in its path, and it doesn't stop. It just keeps rolling and rolling until finally, you are slammed to the ground in a sudden of impact and, BOOM! you're crushed, you're just this endless ache.

I am in FRACTUREs

Fracture
By: Megan Miranda
Reported by: Julianna Helms
**This book is part of the 2012 DAC challenge**

Eleven minutes passed before Delaney Maxwell was pulled from the icy waters of a Maine lake by her best friend Decker Phillips. By then her heart had stopped beating. Her brain had stopped working. She was dead. And yet she somehow defied medical precedent to come back seemingly fine—despite the scans that showed significant brain damage. Everyone wants Delaney to be all right, but she knows she's far from normal. Pulled by strange sensations she can't control or explain, Delaney finds herself drawn to the dying. Is her altered brain now predicting death, or causing it?

Then Delaney meets Troy Varga, who recently emerged from a coma with similar abilities. At first she's reassured to find someone who understands the strangeness of her new existence, but Delaney soon discovers that Troy's motives aren't quite what she thought. Is their gift a miracle, a freak of nature-or something much more frightening?

For fans of best-sellers like Before I Fall and If I Stay, this is a fascinating and heart-rending story about love and friendship and the fine line between life and death. 

-Summary from Goodreads  
Barnes&Noble||Amazon||The Book Depository

As I read this book, there was a particular stanza in Taylor Swift's If This Was A Movie that came to my mind...

Come back, come back, come back to me like 
you would, before you said it's not that easy. 
Before the fight, before I left you out.

This was the most personal book I have ever read. It was irrevocably broken. Tragically beautiful. Unexpectedly fascinating. Pleadingly hopeful. Heartbreakingly desperate.

Photobucket, you dipped my bucket!

Yay! If you saw my previous post, you know that I've apparently used up my Photobucket free storage, so my blog design was completely messed up due to direct links and such.


I am now using Imgur, and it ROCKS. ;)


Alright, alright, so maybe I'm a little biased. But anyway, I just wanted to let you all know that the blog fiasco has been contended with and that I am, in fact, still alive. I've just been really busy this week, but be on the look out for a few reviews coming up! :D


Thank you all for sticking with me! If you see any mishaps in design, please note that it's probably because of darn Photobucket. I didn't want to go back and change the signature on all of my posts (the majority of which have a SOMEONE'S POPULAR photobucket sign) because that would take far too long, so I'm sorry if this hinders your ability to enjoy my blog.


YOU ALL ROCK! \m/ Peace out.