I was very excited to receive a copy through the post of Angelology by Danielle Trussoni, after entering a competition on the Penguin Website. I started reading it straight away and almost at once was caught up in a mysterious world of angels, nuns and a strange old man in a snow laden park in New York. The book is split into three parts, with the middle section going back in time to a significant event that the whole book revolves around. The first and last sections follow Evangeline, a member of the Saint Rose Convent, who receives a letter asking to look at some of the convent's archives. This compels her to become involved with a mystery going back many years involving nuns from the convent and a rich benefactor from New York. She and a researcher (Verlaine) then get caught up in a war between the Nephilim (the offspring of angel fathers and human mothers) and a society called the angelologists. The Nephilim are desperate to recover a lyre concealed by the angelogists during the second world war. The lyre has properties that would enable the Nephilim to become very powerful, to the detriment of the human race.
Overall I enjoyed the book, as I am a fan of thrillers with a twist. I found the characters interesting, although not well-developed enough for me to really care passionately what happened to them. The middle section of the book was a little annoying and not entirely neccessary as a prologue had already summed up what the artefact was that they found in a cave. I quickly skimmed through it really to get to section three, where the real story continued. As the book reached it's climax I could picture it being played out in a movie (and film rights have already been sold), but the ending was a little unsatisfactory and shallow for me. It does have similarities to Dan Browne's books, which again sometimes read a little like film scripts. I much prefer books that are written for readers, rather than for potential movie goers. However, it is worth reading and is far superior to Dan Browne's latest book, The Lost Symbol, which I was very disappointed with.
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Angelology by Danielle Trussoni (competition review) (5 posts)
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Posted 5 months ago #
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There are Angels around us, ready to bring us harm. Danielle Trusson’s riveting ‘Angelology’ destroys sleep and has one mutilating Dr Hook and the Medicine Show’s “I’ll put Angels Around You”, in the compulsion to discover whether the young and innocent Sr Evangeline, the dying Sr Celestine and the enigmatic Gabriella will win out against the unscrupulous Percival in the quest to find and destroy Gabriel’s mystical lyre and save the world from the onslaughts of the fearsome Nephilim, descendants of the fallen angels and the daughters of men.
Trusson entices the reader back and forth from the biblical age of Noah though Europe in the middle ages and the Nazi era to present day New York city with compelling, prose. Her carefully drawn portrayals of the main female characters seduces one into a very willingly suspension of disbelief in the Angelologists and their efforts to rescue mankind from the depredations of the Nephilim.
She is less successful in her depiction of the male characters. Percival Grigori is sometimes believable as the dying representative of the Nephilim with an occasional twinge of sympathy for lesser mortals, but the young Verlaine, who becomes engaged in the Angelogists’ struggle is a frank disappointment. Why in the world would anyone seeing his car trashed by ruthless winged thugs with super-human strength return first to his office to sit reading letters, and then go home, with the only precautions being to avoid the elevator and to lock the doors?
Verlaine aside, it is perhaps the very quality of Trusson’s writing which leads one into serious considerations about the nature of good and evil in the novel. The Nephilim are portrayed as the bringers of evil to humankind. They are also the originators of any useful inventions, such as fire. They came about when angels came to earth and consorted with human women. The angels and their descendants were the epitome of beauty: tall, thin, blond and white. When Noah built the ark, one of them impersonated Japhet, Noah’s son, the ancestor of Europeans. The Nephilim infiltrated the ruling European families and brought about their dominance.
At one level, this could cause one to snicker and remember that the Hon Elijah Mohammed, founder of the Nation of Islam has long preached that white people were descended from devils, and here is a white author agreeing. But there is more here. Why are white, blond, tall and slender taken as the standards of beauty, even fallen beauty? More important, do both evil and knowledge- the knowledge of good and evil- originate from outside of humankind, and reside only in one part of the human race, or are they part of the entire human condition?
Then there are the Angelogists. The Nephilim are evil and manifestly stop at nothing, torture and murder included, to achieve their aims, but the Angelogists are equally ruthless. One of Evangeline’s early memories is of seeing three Nephilim confined naked in laboratory cages, as they are being experimented upon, and of hearing the discussion that makes it clear that they will be killed and disposed of like laboratory rats. If the good people behave like the evil people to defeat evil, then has evil not surely triumphed?
Perhaps these will all be resolved in the next volume.
Posted 5 months ago # -
Many scholars have spent much debate over the meaning of the Biblical Nephilim. Genesis 6:4
"The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown."
Forget the common angelic images of cherubic infants with wings and harps, Danielle Trussoni paints a far darker picture of these "fallen angels" attributing most of mankind's major discoveries to them.
The story is somewhat of a mixture between Raiders of the Lost Ark (search for lost artifact with supernatural powers) and Dan Brown (secret societies/Catholic church).Good versus Evil. The ending clearly leaves room for a sequel/film franchise. Indeed the whole book sometimes reads more like a potential film script. If it appears that "Angels are the new vampires" in fiction just now, I doubt that any other author will paint quite as bleak a picture of these celestial creatures. Guardian Angels they certainly aren't!
Did I enjoy it? Yes...but with reservations
Would I buy the next installment? possibly
Would I recommend it? Yes...but with reservations. Fans of Dan Brown will love itPosted 4 months ago # -
I was delighted to win a review copy of Angelology and have had a great time reading it over Easter. As a librarian I am always looking for exciting new fiction to recommend to readers and am often asked "I've just read x & enjoyed it. What can I move on to?" This book ticks lots of boxes for those who seek genre fiction. If you have enjoyed Dan Brown with his mix of religion & thriller fiction, or Stephenie Meyer & co., where vampires meet romance, then this is probably a book you will want to try.
I don't want to discuss the plot as it's hard not to introduce spoilers when writing about thriller fiction but Danielle Trussoni's writing grabs the reader from page 1 and her research into religious and historical areas together with her ability to invent plausible, three-dimensional characters gives the story a solidity which keeps the pages turning into the night as you just have to read a little further before turning out the light...
It is well paced, reading like a movie script as the taut thriller accelerates to a denoument yet the story is set up for a possible sequel or even series. The latter would please many readers and I'm sure it won't be long before we see Sister Evangeline and the Nephilim onscreen too.
Interestingly this book is being promoted initially to adults but I believe it will have a huge appeal to the teenage market too, where it might be time for vampires to make way for angels (even evil ones).
Posted 4 months ago # -
I,too, was delighted to receive a copy of Angelology to review. I enjoyed it as a thriller with a fantasy element. Neither of those two genres are what I would normally read- that is one of the great things about entering these competitions, you get to read books you wouldn't normally choose!
I agree with other reviewers - this novel had elements of Dan Brown in it (though I've only read the Da Vinci Code, and didn't particularly enjoy it). The author managed to incorporate a number of elements (mythology, history,human relationships,suspense) into an interesting enough book, but as stated by a previous reviewer, there is a large section in the middle that was superfluous to the story and the characters were almost there but just lacking something to them true credibility. The ending was disappointing - all it lacked was the phrase 'To Be Continued'!!! But who would have thought that Fallen Angels live such interesting lives?
And a note to the Penguin staff - please accept my apologies for the lateness of this post, it has taken me three and a half days to get someone in to repair my computer. Would that I could blame the Nephilim, but alas no!
Posted 4 months ago #
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