Angel's Fury [Paperback]

(Taken from variousaltitudes.wordpress.com)

I finished this book over a week ago now, but I've been unable to fathom how to review it. I mean, I really enjoyed this book; it has big themes, a strong female heroine and its pretty dark for teenage fiction. Yet something niggled at the back of my mind, telling me that nothing I possibly say could get across how much I like Angel's Fury.

All right, so maybe I should start with the protagonist. Cassie Farrier is having nightmares, those terrible nightmares where you wake up terrified, only hers are about one-hundred times worse than anyone else's. (Apart from the dream I had where my father drove me off the side of a multi-storey car park, that was pretty horrendous, and I refused to speak to him for a week afterwards.) Yet she soon begins to realise that what she's seeing in her dream actually happened.

There was something incredibly real about Cassie. The way she spoke, and behaved, you could imagine yourself feeling the same uncertainty, and I have to say that if I were her, I think I'd have fallen down at the first hurdle. The characterisation of Cassie could have gone way over the top, yet it didn't, she did what all teenagers do when they think there's something wrong with them: she hid it. She kept everything bottled up, and I think this is another reason I enjoyed Cassie's character.

The book also has an incredibly fast-pace. If you wanted to, you could finish it within a few hours. This was another of those books where I held my breath and didn't realise I was doing so until I was completely out of breath. It encompasses a thriller, a romance and fantasy fiction, as well as making the reader debate about the possibility of reincarnation.

You might be shying away at the mention of romance in teenage novel, but in this novel, it's tentative, and isn't the be all and end all of the world. Seth and Cassie's lives are intertwined in a big way, but there's a rather hefty question over whether they can be together or not, and I was pleased how Pearce handled the relationship, and the repercussions their past lives have on them now.

There are a great many cultural references that give the characters depth. Cassie isn't reading Wuthering Heights she's reading a Meg Cabot novel, and in my opinion this is much more believable for a teenager. Then we have the mention of Blackadder Goes Forth, and its finale, and how it would affect Cassie, and that, to me, was just brilliant.

Throughout the novel, I was unsure who Cassie could trust. Pearce keeps the reader waiting until the last possible moment before revealing who the villain of the piece is, and it was a big `oh yeah, I should have seen that coming moment.'

I met Bryony at a signing on the 16th July and she's extremely kind and approachable and offered me book recommendations. She even led me around Waterstones looking for a book, and yes, I am now the proud owner of a signed copy of Angel's Fury.

Until next time, that is all.

Angel's Fury whilst being aimed at a teenage audience certainly deserves much wider recognition. This is the debut novel from Bryony Pearce and it's a very confident start. Cassie is a feisty loner who suffers vivid nightmares and through a quirk of fate discovers that not all of her dreams are fiction. From there we are sent on a spiralling journey as Cassie tries to make sense of her dreams , discovers past secrets and finds herself in serious peril. As her life starts to come apart at the seams a mysterious doctor from her past comes to help her. Cassie then learns that her own fate is entwined with the past and a particularly determined villain is hell bent on carrying out his quest and it won't just affect Cassie but all of us. Angel's Fury is well written with well rounded out characters. Our heroine Cassie is very identifiable and the supporting characters are more than just background.. The villain is truly memorable and there are more than a few shocks and chills on the way. I myself am a particularly slow reader but even I couldn't put the last third of the book down. I had to follow it to its conclusion. If I have one criticism it is that the book has been marketed to the "Twilight" crowd which is exclusively aimed at teenage girls, but boys will enjoy this book too and certainly adults. It deserves to stand on its own as it's a very well-crafted story. I heartily recommend it to all age groups.

Angel's Fury is not the genre of book I would normally read but I have been very pleasantly surprised by it. When it arrived in the post I decided to have a quick look at the first chapter intending to put it aside for another day to read the rest since it wasn't my kind of book anyway. Just a few sentences in I was hooked and finding any excuse to stop what I should be doing to read some more. The characters and story are so real I found myself thinking about the story even when I wasn't reading it. There is enough historical fact to make the potentially implausible seem perfectly possible and I strongly recommend not starting the last section of this book without the time to finish it- a very late night was spent in my house because I simply could not leave the book unfinished.
Overall this is a brilliant book and I look forward to more from the author.