Hello Everyone!
As you know, if you are friends with me on Goodreads (Jaime Leigh) or if you follow me on Instagram (@Officalsamepage), I was recently read Angelfall by Susan Ee on my way back from my last road trip of the summer. I was going to post a review for Angelfall the same week that I posted my review for HP and the Cursed Child. However, as time went on, I felt more and more conflicted about how to rate/review the book. There were some aspects of the book, like the occasional awkward sentence or three, that were obvious reasons to deduct stars from my rating. (I will say though that awkward writing usually comes with any debut novel and is usually fixable by more writing experience). I felt conflicted because I thought that I was going to read a different book.
In everything from the back cover, to the quotes from critics, to other reviewers, I went into Angelfall convinced that I was going to read a Syfi thriller that had a darker tone with heavier themes. One could argue that Angelfall fits into this category just fine. I am not one of those people.
“Horror is a genre of fiction which is intended to, or has the capacity to frighten, scare, disgust, or startle their readers or viewers by inducing feelings of horror and terror.”-Webster Dictionary
This is a Syfi Horror book. I don’t know if that category exists, but if it doesn’t then it does now. Having half eaten small girls hanging from trees as they were strung up to feed to the Nephelium is not dark. That is horror. Having a pile of innocent children’s bodies being cut open,after they have been ripped out of the sky, sewn back together like Frankenstein's monster and then having those small children become demons. Horror. Having a demon child that was once the protagonist’s sister crawl out of this pile of bodies. Horror. Having the mother go crazy and basically become a post apocalyptic Joker. Horror. Angels. Syfi.
I do not read horror, which is why I did not enjoy this book. If I did enjoy horror, I would have enjoyed this book a great deal more.So my lower, 2 ½ or 3 star rating isn’t really accurate. I enjoyed the main character. I enjoyed Raphael and Obi. And man did I enjoy the last scene when Raphael delivered Penryn to her mother and sister. Whoo! But I think that, if I would have know what I was getting myself into, and if the reviews or the back of the book had mentioned the horror aspects of the novel, I wouldn’t have picked this book up. Horror is just not my cup of tea.
Hopefully we can get a discussion going about mislabeled or poorly labeled/marketed books and if there are any books that you feel conflicted about rating because the content of the book was not what you were expecting. Let me know on Goodreads and in the comments. Or shoot me an email through the “Contact” tab on my blog. I would love to know your thoughts on the subject.
Until next time,
Jaime