Book Review: Angelopolis by Danielle Trussoni

The characters I know and loathe
are at it again in Angelopolis.

If you read this blog regularly, you know that the first book in this series, Angelology, earned my undying loathing for its failure to capitalize on a near-brilliant premise. Well, that and some of the worst writing I've ever read in a book praised by everyone from the New York Times to USA Today. Clearly there was some Kool-Aid going around and everyone became insane for a brief period of time in 2010.  

Well, this time I was much smarter about things. I didn't spend my own money--I patronized my local library. There's one more sliver of good news here: I didn't loathe it quite as much as the first one. If the first book received a grade of F from me, this one's a D.  It might just be because instead of 450 mind-numbing anger-inducing pages, this one's a scant 300. Let's see how it shakes down, shall we?

Spoiler-free summary:

The heroine of the last book, Evangeline, is an angel (we learned this at the very end of Angelology). Verlaine, her love interest, has become an angel hunter and spent the last 10 years looking for her. Yes, we have jumped 10 years forward in time. Why? God knows. Two or three years would probably have sufficed. Verlaine and Evangeline have a brief run-in that convinces Verlaine he is in love with her. Evangeline is kidnapped by another angel, working for the Grigori family (angel bad guys), but not before she slips Verlaine a Faberge egg. Verlaine and Bruno, his angel hunting mentor, must figure out what the egg means and where Evangeline has been taken.

WTF spoiler-filled summary:

Grad school asshats
always mention the Panopticon
when they want to seem smart.

The angels are trying to build themselves a city and take over the planet. Apparently, some Nephilim descendants used to give birth by laying eggs. People came out of these eggs, I shit you not.  Egg births have become quite rare, although they are desirable for the higher-quality angelic offspring they produce.  Queen Victoria is a Nephilim descendant and, by extension, Empress Alexandra of Russia. Alexandra had an egg birth that occurred during what history has recorded as a phantom pregnancy. Alexandra was actually impregnated by the archangel Gabriel and so the resulting egg-child (Lucien) is of a purer angelic strain than ordinary Nephilim. There is some huge angel prison in Siberia, modeled after the Panopticon of Jeremy Bentham. It blows up in the end. Oh, and there's an angel vaccination of sorts, which could turn an angel or a Nephilim human again.  It can only be made once due to the rarity of one of its ingredients. The angel hunters made it, and Verlaine hands it over to Evangeline, thinking she will quaff it, but no, she steals it and leaves to hang out with Lucien, who is actually her father. Verlaine gets pissed and instantly wants to kill her (again). He gets voted as the leader of the next round of angel/Nephilim resistance fighters. The end. My head hurts.

Things that Didn't Suck

1. Angelopolis was shorter than the first book.  This represents an attempt on the author's part to keep the plot more tightly controlled. It also meant the whole thing gets over with faster.   

2. The Romanovs were peripheral characters. Ideas that link real people and historical events to mythological events are cool.

3. It created some interesting mythology about the Biblical flood, Noah, the Ark's location, and what exactly got preserved on that Ark. Those are all the nice things I can think of to say.

Things that Sucked

1. The author still seems to believe that long-winded explanations and backstory and plot setup can take up 70% of a book without the reader getting bored. It is DISASTROUS. In the quote below, a co-worker of Dr. Azov, an angelologist, asks a visiting angelologist named Vera if she needs a refresher on the kind of work Azov does before meeting the good doctor:  

"No need," Vera said. "I know that Azov has occupied the center on St. Ivan Island for over three decades--since before I was born. His outpost was created in the early eighties, when a body of research pointed to the presence of well-preserved artifacts under the Black Sea. Before this, angelologists stationed in Bulgaria worked near the Devil's Throat in the Rhodope mountain chain, where they monitored the buildup of nephilim and, of course, acted as a barrier should the Watchers escape." (p 136)

Holy mother of God, if the answer to someone's question is a simple "no," just say "no."  

2. The dialogue is tragic. It's artificial at best, and often used to deliver complicated history lessons. This makes the characters themselves seem even more wooden than they actually are. Here's one stellar example of tragic dialogue:

"Absolutely certain," he said. "And I'm not the only one--an angelologist is hunting her at this very moment. An angel hunter." 

How could we fail to be aware of the fact that an ANGELOLOGIST who is HUNTING her is an angel hunter?  At what point in the second sentence is this unclear enough to need a third?

3. The tone and sentence structure never change. A five-page digression into angelology and a motorcycle action scene are treated exactly the same way, and this does a disservice to the few action scenes. It gives the book a plodding feel. 

4. There is no humor whatsoever. This series takes it itself so goddamn seriously.  Even books and shows that deal with the end of the world need a little humor. Supernatural does this amazingly well.  You can't have DANGER DANGER BIBLICAL WEIRDNESS RASPUTIN DANGER LECTURE ON BIBLICAL WEIRDNESS OMG WORLD ENDING PANOPTICON THE END without a moment or two of levity. People are not robots. I found myself seeking an escape from this book, which is theoretically entertainment, and thus supposed to be an escape. Epic fail.   

5. The characters are flat. They aren't allowed to do or say anything except spout Trussoni's "big ideas" about history and angelology. They don't have favorite foods or favorite colors or get bitten by bugs or hate their shoes or express real-life opinions about anything non plot-related. They don't have thoughts about past loves or wives or girlfriends or boyfriends or past experiences that reveal who they are. They are plot devices, not people. This is the closest to characterization you get:

He would be forty-three years old in less than a week and he was in the best condition of his life, able to run for miles without breaking a sweat.  (p 35)

6.  The writing is flat.  Everything is told, never shown. We are simply told what characters feel. They do not express it or show it. It gets boring. So very boring. Apparently, Trussoni graduated from the Iowa Writer's Workshop. Coulda fooled me.

"You want to re-create paradise," Angela said, astonished.

Someone who's good at writing wouldn't have needed to explain the bad guy's shtick, and could have used a gesture or body language to convey said astonishment. Here's another awesome example:

There was a rusty Zid motorcycle parked nearby, its wires hanging loose. The engine was vastly different from his Ducati, but in a matter of seconds, he'd hot-wired the bike, thrown his leg over the leather seat, and was speeding after Eno. (p 125)

Hmm. In addition to the multiple "was" verb forms making this theoretically exciting chase scene boring, this passage begs several logistical questions. If Verlaine has a Ducati, how is he intimately familiar with the workings of a Zid engine? What the hell are the wires doing hanging loose in the first place?  Wouldn't the owner, like, I don't know, fix that shit?  And how, pray tell, does one hot-wire a motorcycle? A bit of authenticity here would have helped. At least YouTube it and try and find out how it's done.

As Verlaine followed Angela's movements, he realized that his entire body had gone rigid. (p 82)

In the above, why wouldn't you simply say, "Verlane's body went rigid"? All of the "following" and "realizing" dilute the power of the physical effect Trussoni is trying to create. This is bush league, people.

From the way she looked at him, he could feel her rage. (p 178)

And again, we have the bush league version of telling, not showing.  How did she look up at him? What was in her eyes, in her body language?

7.  Some of the facts are not right. Could have been a simple typo, but the book gives 1917 as the Romanov execution year. Nope.  Also, when mentioning the Romanov execution, she talks about them going out "into the cold."  Um, it was July. And hot as Hades. Not sure anything would have been cold. Minor quibbles, I know, but they exist.

I give up. I fucking give up.

8. The sheer ridiculosity of the egg birth thing. I just don't buy it.  Nephilim lay eggs?  Like, an egg actually grows in the woman and she gives birth to it?  Does it then hatch immediately?  Or does it friggin' incubate in a bassinet? And I'm supposed to believe Peter the Great came out of an egg?  All Trussoni says is, "...how such a birth had come to pass was never documented" (p 221). Wow, convenient, huh? But if the ranks of European royalty are littered with Nephilim, what happened in the days when many royal births were public? Did the woman know in advance whether she'd give birth to an egg or a baby?  How could all the ladies-in-waiting and midwives who were present at egg births throughout history have been silenced? This just has too many logistical weirdnesses to it.  I can't suspend my disbelief that far. And who said angels have egg babies? They aren't birds.  Birds evolved from dinosaurs. Did angels evolve from dinosaurs, too? Again, I am confused.  If the author has thought through the answers to these questions, they need to be shared.  In a way that doesn't involve eight pages of lecturing dialogue. But this is what we get:

Verlaine stole a look at Vera, wondering how all of this was striking her. It seemed that her dubious theories about Easter eggs and royal egg births could be supported by the tsarina's collection. (p 104) 

WTF? Because the Romanovs had Faberge eggs, they MUST be nephilim?  I have a carving of an elephant on my bookshelf.  Does that mean I'm half pachyderm?

9.  The sheer ridiculosity of the idea that Empress Alexandra and her daughters had wings. That she taught them to fly on lazy afternoons in the Crimea. I mean, really.  If anyone had wings, it would have been Felix Yussupov, right?  And isn't it extremely likely that some one in the Romanov entourage would have seen crap like this?  Again, how were these witnesses silenced? Even when on "vacation" at Livadia in the Crimea, there was still an enormous household of servants, tutors, cooks, ladies in waiting, and friends.  It strains credulity that this could have happened. And let's think a little harder about this...if they did have wings, how likely is it that they would have been held prisoner for so long?  Especially toward the end, after the rescue attempt failed?  Couldn't they have flown away from the Ipatiev house?  It boggles the mind. But, no, in the author's world, this is legit:

She spent hours grooming her great pink wings. She would use her leisure time teaching her daughters to fly in the private garden of their country estate in the Crimea. (p 112)

10. I'm still not clear on *why* the archangel Gabriel chose to impregnate Alexandra. What was so important about that time, that situation? It's important for the world-building and mythology, but it was glossed over.  I mean, why not impregnate Anne Boleyn?  Surely she prayed just as hard for a son as Alexandra. What was so important about Alexandra and Russia and that moment in time?  We are never told. 

11.  Trussoni is incredibly bad at building a believable relationship. Verlaine and Evangline are cardboard characters, so it's impossible to take them seriously when they try to feel things.  Like love.  Verlaine runs the gamut from "I hate her, I want to kill her" to "Maybe she's not so bad" to "I freakin' love her" to "I hate that bitch."  The words fly out of his mouth and it feels random because there is no establishment of his emotional history.  Here's the big moment when Evangeline and Verlaine have some Jedi mind-meld moment of togetherness as they escape from danger:

He was sure that all of the thoughts and all of the desires that he'd ever felt had collected in his heart at that moment. (p 290)

So glad he's sure.  Wouldn't want any of those stray, unnamed thoughts or desires getting away from him now.

12. The number of times she uses the phrase "as if" to describe things that are happening is staggering.  Witness the following examples: 

The entire structure had the appearance of a ruin, the light fixtures crude, as if the building had been wired for only the most basic functionality." (p 151)

 It was as if they all felt that a solution was possible, that once they made it to Valko they would overcome the seemingly impossible odds. (p 175)

 ...a second blast of searing heat seized her, this one more intensely painful than the first, as if her skin had been peeled away in one clean sweep. (p 258)

ONE PARAGRAPH LATER 

...the moment Vera woke it seemed to her that she had died and emerged on the other side of existence, as if Charon had in fact taken her across the deathly river Styx to the banks of hell. (p 258)

 ONE SENTENCE LATER

Her body felt stiff and hot, as if she had been dipped in wax. (p 258)

The Takeaway
This book is a flop. There is no deft or beautiful language, no metaphor, nothing of note linguistically. It's just a weird-ass confusing story, told with little grace or charm and absolutely no hint of humor or spark or real life.

Book Review: Angelology by Danielle Trussoni

I want my money back.

I've typed and deleted at least 17 opening lines for this review, stumped by the prospect of finding a civil way to express my displeasure with this book and its publisher.

The premise was golden.  The reviews were glittering.  The words and the heart and the soul of this book are tarnished and rotten.  I can only assume that the publisher, Penguin, has paid off everyone from the the New York Times to USA Today in an effort to generate reviews good enough to get me to buy the book.   I want my $16 back.  

Let me attempt to make my case:

Minor Quibbles

1.  The title.  
Angelology.  It's clunky and awkward, as are words like "angelologists" and "angeleological."  Was there no interesting descriptive phrase or snippet of a Bible verse that could have sufficed?

2.  The cover.  
Could they have made this look more like an ad for a saints and sinners ball at a gay S&M club?  Ugh.  (If you haven't seen the cover, a quick Google image search will do the trick.)

Major Quibbles

1.  The writing.  
It's bad, folks.  Way too many compound sentences, too many coordinating conjunctions, too
many obvious thoughts, too much telling instead of showing, too many cliched descriptions and emotions, too many stilted and artificial lines of dialogue.  A few cringe-worthy examples:

Exhibit A
"Throughout the remaining weeks of October, Gabriella and I spent our days in Dr. Seraphina's office, working with quiet determination as we cataloged and organized the mountains of information.  The intensity of our schedule and the passion with which I strove to understand the materials before me left me too exhausted to ponder Gabriella's increasingly strange behavior" (173).

This sounds like schlock from the 19th century, B-level Balzac or a wannabe Bronte.  Why "quiet" determination?  To distinguish from "noisy" determination?   Why not describe the feel of the character's fingers, desiccated by shuffling papers?  Why not describe Celestine as she's keeping her eyes open, struggling against sleep, instead of merely telling us she's exhausted?  Also, since she's described Gabriella's behavior for us, she doesn't need to repeat that it's "increasingly strange."  We know.  We were there.

Exhibit B
"Standing in her white cotton briefs and cotton undershirt (standard garments ordered in bulk and distributed biyearly to all the sisters at St. Rose), she looked at herself with an appraising, analytic eye--the thin arms and legs, the flat stomach, the tousled brown hair, the golden pendant resting upon her breastbone.  The reflection floating on the glass before her was that of a sleepy young woman" (5).

"Biyearly"?  Google's dictionary function defines "biyearly" as every two years OR twice a year.  Which is it?  Was it too much trouble to distinguish between biannual and biennial?  Why use both "appraising" and "analytic"?  What's the difference?  Surely there's a better way than the old look-in-a-mirror gimmick to describe the main character's appearance.  And, having resorted to that gimmick, Trussoni then gives us absolutely nothing unique.  We get a thin, brown-haired girl.  That's it.  A totally wasted opportunity.  Does she have freckles?  Eye color?  Interesting shape to the nose?  Bangs?  Anything we can use to picture this
character?  Thin and brown-haired could be Angelina Jolie or Laura Bush.  And why that last sum-it-up sentence?  Why do we need to be told she's a sleepy young woman?  Thanks to the handy time stamp at the chapter's beginning, we know it's 4:45 am.  Unless she's superwoman, she's probably sleepy.  And unless she's a space alien confirming that her ectomorphic disguise is still in place, do we really need it confirmed that she's a young woman?

Exhibit C
"Her face had flushed as she spoke, and for a fleeting moment Evangeline could imagine the intense young woman who had arrived at St. Rose Convent more than fifty years before.  The physical effort of Celestine's speech overwhelmed her.  Lifting a trembling hand to her mouth, she began to cough.  She appeared to consider her physical frailty with dispassionate attention, as if noting how the mind burned brightly as ever even as the body made its way to dust" (341).

Why "a fleeting moment"?  Why not just "a moment"?  Far less cliche that way.  And why "intense young woman"?  Why not "tormented," or something a bit more descriptive?  And how awkward is "she appeared to consider her physical frailty with dispassionate attention"?  Bordering on pedantry, if you ask me.

This is what Booklist, via Amazon.com, calls "textured prose as seamless as the never-ending stream of prayers offered up by St. Rose Convent's Sisters of Perpetual Adoration."  Hmm.  The author bio states that Trussoni is a graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop.  Note to self:  Never go to the Iowa Writer's Workshop.  It obviously doesn't help.

2. The characters.  
I've seen more developed characters in children's cereal commercials.  You don't learn who they are.  You don't learn to like them.  They wander around like adolescent dupes, unquestioning, unseeing, unsympathetic.  Writing for the New York Times Book Review, Susann Cokal notes the novel's "dewy but adaptable heroine" and "dashingly cruel villain."  Um, yeah.  Not sure which book she got in the mail, but it's not the one that I bought.

3.  The plot.  
It has more holes than a colander.

Hole the First:  The background story.  Before the flood, when humanity was just starting to get out of control, God sent 200 angels (known as "the Watchers") to keep an eye on things.  They got the hots for human women, took them as wives, and had human-angel hybrid children, called Nephilim.  The Nephilim taught their children important skills unknown to mere mortals, like metalworking and healing spells and how to apply makeup.  The Nephilim go a little power-mad, banding together to bend humans to their will.  Humanity gets pissed, and the archangels come down to earth and cast the Watchers into an abyss, where they are still held.  The Nephilim, their children, ignore their cries for help.  Everyone in the book wonders why the Nephilim didn't help their fathers.  Even a premier angelologist, Dr. Seraphina, admits the Nephilim would have been stronger with the Watchers' help.  Why don't the sons rescue the fathers?  This is never explained.  Why don't the archangels do something to stop the Nephilim, if they're the real troublemakers?  This is never explained.  Why doesn't anyone ever question the god that's supposedly behind all this?  This is never explained.  Why can't creatures as smart and divine as angels can't find a way out of a few cages in a ravine, in thousands of years?  This is not explained.  Do you sense a pattern?

Hole the Second:  The artifact everyone's searching for.  It's a magical lyre that presumably belonged to the archangel Gabriel.  The Nephilim believe it will cure them of a wasting disease that has been attacking their ranks, thanks to an angelologist's research on the effect of celestial instruments on molecular structure.  That scientist, the main character's deceased mother, believed the lyre "was the primary instrument, the one that could return the Nephilim to a state of angelic purity unseen upon earth since the time of the watchers" (280).  At the same time, when the lyre is found and assembled, one character warns another, "Nothing is known about the correct method of playing the lyre.  The horrors you could bring upon the world are unimaginable.  I beg you, stop."  (440)  So...wait a sec.  There's a scientist who claimed the lyre would heal the angels thanks to its molecular vibrations, yet at the same time, it's also powerful enough to destroy the whole freaking world.  Which is it?  Cure-all or end-all?  It should be one or the other.  These characters don't know nearly enough to be speaking with such authority.

Hole the Third:  Nephilistic genealogy.  I'm still confused on this one.  "A child born to Nephilim parents, without the slightest trace of angelic traits, might in turn produce a Nephilistic offspring.  It was an uncommon occurrence, to be sure, but not unheard of...While humans carried the genetic potential to create a Nephilistic child, the Nephilim themselves embodied the angelic ideal.  Only a Nephilistic being could develop wings" (70).  Trussoni attempts to tie in Mendelian genetics and the idea of the double-recessive gene producing angelic traits.  The character who linked angelic traits to Watson and Crick's research is presented as a genius, killed for her valuable knowledge.  This is the same character who believed the lyre would both heal angels and rip apart the fabric of the world as we know it.  Later in the book, when one of the main characters actually develops wings, she is mystified.  Another character offers a lame explanation:  "Your father and I had you examined as a little girl, and we saw that your lungs were formed like those of a Nephilistic child, but from our studies--and the work Angela had conducted on Nephilistic decline--we knew that a large percentage of Nephilim do not grow wings at all.  Genetics are not enough.  there have to be many other factors present" (441).  Did I read that correctly....genetics are not enough??  Then why did Trussoni try and tie in Mendelian genetics earlier in the book?  It feels like Trussoni is trying to be Dan Brown (or Isaac Newton) and tie in religion, mythology, and science, when she doesn't know enough about what she's talking about to do it right, resulting in ridiculous disclaimers like this quotation.  The whole scheme feels half-baked, as if she started writing before she figured out the hard and fast rules of this universe she wants to create.  I don't buy it.

4.  The timing.
Everything happens in one day.  The characters have to constantly refer back to this point with internal thoughts like, "was it only the previous morning?" (451).  The male hero, Verlaine, supposedly falls in love with the heroine, Evangeline, in 24 hours, a fact that we're repeatedly reminded of in case we forget.  It's as if Trussoni knows how illogical it all is and has to take great care to tell us that, no, it's fine, it's cool, Verlaine doesn't really understand it either:  "Recent events had left him numb.  Perhaps he was in shock.  He couldn't reconcile the world he had lived in the day before with the one he had now entered.  Sinking onto a couch, he stared through the window at the darkness beyond. Only hours before Evangeline had sat at his side on that very couch, so close he could feel her every movement.  The strength of his feelings for her baffled him.  Was it possible that he had met her only yesterday?  Now, after so little time, she filled his thoughts" (448).

Guess what?  It baffles me, too.

5.  The missing elements.
Namely, religion and God.  For a book based on a Bible verse, the novel largely ignores both of these, focusing solely on angelic cosmology.  Is this realistic?  I don't think so.  One of the main characters, Evangeline, is a sort of apprentice nun in a convent.  She rarely thinks of God, despite being in a convent for more than ten years.  The story's modern events unfold between Christmas Eve and Christmas night.  No one mentions God, or the fact that it's Christmas, the holiest day in the year for Christians.  No prayers, no moment to even recognize the significance.  In fact, the novel's chapter headings make it painfully clear when the story takes place--but there's no actual significance to the story taking place either on Christmas or in the year 1999.   The only reason I can think of for the novel's taking place in 1999 is because the sequel plans to make use of 9/11 in some reductive, sickening way.

6.  The total lapses in judgment shown by major characters.
Celestine, a young apprentice angelologist, does nothing but read and study about angels, Nephilim, and the thousands of years of struggle between the two. Then, when she sees her friend and rival Gabriella in an embrace with a man who is supremely beautiful, she fails to connect the dots.  Trussoni writes, "His skin was luminous white and appeared to me--so startled by his presence--to have an unearthly glow...Aside from the fact that male guests were restricted from visiting our apartments, there had been something disturbing about the man himself, something eerie and abnormal that I could not fully identify.  My inability to understand what I had seen and the chaotic mix of loyalty and rivalry I felt toward Gabriella made it impossible to tell Dr. Seraphina..." (131-32).

Really, kiddo?  You see a strange, glowing being making out with your roomate, in the midst of a millenia-old war between human and angel in which you are intrinsically involved, and YOU DON'T EVEN CONSIDER THE FACT THAT THE GLOWING MAN IS ONE OF THEM?  How stupid can one character be?  This would be like a fifteen-year-old Steve Irwin seeing a crocodile's scales rising up out of the water and walking on by, thinking, hmm, that's an awfully big floating log.

A second fatal lapse in judgment happens to Evangeline.  When she goes into the convent's Mission Office to see her personal file (after reading letters that reveal her family's role in the human v. Nephilim battle), she finds that her file holds much more material than she would have guessed.  She finds lab results (blood tests), handwriting analysis, notes from a doctor's visit, and x-rays.  Yet Evangeline distinctly remembers her father never taking her to a doctor when she was younger.  She ignores this glaring warning and keeps paging through the file.  Really?  Really?  You're in the midst of discovering you aren't who you think you are, that your family isn't who you think they are, that nothing is as it seems, and you skip over vital personal information that doesn't match up with your own memory of your past?  Are you that stupid?  Apparently, the answer is yes.

7.  The feel, the soul, the heart.
The book left me cold.  It made me angry for what could have been.  It made me angry at the agent, editor, and publisher who pushed this thing through the publishing process with all of these faults, so deftly described by a multitude of Amazon.com reviewers.  Why this book?  Why this deeply flawed book and not another, better-written manuscript?  It boggles the mind.

We, the reading public, deserve better.