Tuesday 28 January 2014

Fallen by Lauren Kate

Title: Fallen
Author: Lauren Kate
Publisher: Doubleday
Released: January 1st 2009
Pages: 452 (Paperback)

SOME ANGELS ARE DESTINED TO FALL.

Instant. Intense. Weirdly familiar . . .

The moment Luce looks at Daniel she knows she has never felt like this before. Except she can't shake the feeling that she has . . . and with him - a boy she doesn't remember ever setting eyes on.

Will her attempt to find out why enlighten her - or destroy her?

Dangerously exciting and darkly romantic....

The first time I read Fallen was when I was twelve years old and it had first been released. It was love from the very first page, and I remember anxiously waiting a year for the sequel, Torment, to be released. Yet when it was finally released, I didn't feel the same spark I had when reading Fallen, and so I never continued on with the series. However, recently I haven't been able to get the series out of my mind and so I thought hey - why not?

I definitely remember why my twelve year old self loved it. Who couldn't resist a reform academy full of gorgeous fallen angels? But there were a lot of things that I'm sure I loved then but just found plain irritating now, characterisation being one of them. Luce is incredibly annoying, and Kate seemed to go to extreme lengths to make her appear idiotic - which totally worked. In my eyes, she was on par with our friend Bella Swan, chasing around after some hot mythical being who just so happens to be deeply in love with her in all her plain human-ness. Oh wait, I'm sorry, did I say plain? Kate characterises Luce to be beautiful, and damn is she all too aware of it. We can't go a chapter without her talking about how silky and wonderful her hair is, or how soft her porcelain skin is, or how she's so perfect. It just added to her overall annoying personality.

Daniel stressed me out. He is so disagreeable, so moody, so temperamental that I just wanted to smack him around the head to knock some sense into him. I get that he was supposed to be the elusive and mysterious heartthrob, but he just came across as an utter arse. I know that lot of the storyline revolves around Daniel and Luce's supposed soul-mate compatibility, but I don't get why she stuck around for so long. Even if you're drawn to a person, if they're that rude to you, you don't just sit back and take it (which, as a side note, is exactly what she did). I almost preferred Cam - but alas he turned into a slimy creep and I just found him altogether uncomfortable. (He wants Luce too, by the way. Just in case you were wondering if there was a freakin' pointless love triangle somewhere in this novel. Kind of the cherry on top, am I right?)

I think the biggest problem I overall had with this novel is that the fallen angels thing isn't explained. Yeah, nearly everyone in the college is an angel or somewhat involved, but why are they there? Who are they fighting? What are the sides? Where is the background information? I'm sure you find out more about them in the following three books, but I really would have liked to have been told just a little bit in this instalment. Since we weren't, Luce blindly accepting that they are all angels and are fighting some crazy war seems a bit ridiculous. I don't know about you, but if a hot guy told me he was an angel, I'd kind of definitely get the heck out of there.

I'd recommend this book to twelve year olds, I really would. I loved it at that age - it has just the right amount of darkness and seduction to lure in a preteen, but not anyone older. So any YA bloggers reading this: don't pick it up. I'm 73.9% sure you won't like it.
Rating: 2/5

4 comments:

  1. I started reading this series a while back, I read this one at least three years ago. When I first read it I loved it also. I thought it was a really good book, than I read Torment and it went down hill from there. I still want to finish this series, but I don't know if I'm going to just read the last one or re-read the whole series since I haven't read the books in a while. But after reading this review and a lot of other negative reviews for this series in general I don't even know if I'm going to read the last one. I think I still might just to finish the series and have it over and done with, but I don't know because the series is a little bad. It has it good moments but as a whole it isn't the best. You know something's wrong when a reader skipped about 200 pages of the third book.
    Great review, sorry this re-read was a little disappointing.

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  3. I read the Fallen a while ago and I just loved it, after reading Torment I was quite disappointed but that was the time when I couldn't stop reading a story, at that time I had that crazy instinct to keep buying the newly released books in every serie which I started and liked at first (sometimes I still do this). Anyway I even have the last book but I just can't force myself to start it... maybe in the summer? Hmm I'm not sure (sigh), good review by the way :) Liked your point of the love triangle, it was really boring and totally obvious who she'll choose... and in the second book there was another love triangle... why?
    Will you watch the movie based on Fallen?

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