Angel Burn, by L.A. Weatherly
Author: L.A. Weatherly
Genre: YA Paranormal Romance
Pages: 403
Rating: 3.5 stars
Summary (taken from Goodreads): Willow knows she’s different from other girls, and not just because she loves tinkering with cars. Willow has a gift. She can look into the future and know people’s dreams and hopes, their sorrows and regrets, just by touching them. She has no idea where this power comes from. But the assassin, Alex, does. Gorgeous, mysterious Alex knows more about Willow than Willow herself. He knows that her powers link to dark and dangerous forces, and that he’s one of the few humans left who can fight them. When Alex finds himself falling in love with his sworn enemy, he discovers that nothing is as it seems, least of all good and evil. In the first book in an action-packed, romantic trilogy, L..A. Weatherly sends readers on a thrill-ride of a road trip - and depicts the human race at the brink of a future as catastrophic as it is deceptively beautiful.
My thoughts:
This book gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “touched by an angel”.
Because as we learn in the book’s opening pages, angels? Will bad touch you to death. Angels aren’t guardians of humanity or messengers of God; they are inter-dimensional beings who feed on our life force, causing serious physical and mental illnesses in the people they’ve fed from. (Sort of like Glory in Buffy, Season Five.) It’s called “angel burn”, and though the people burned by angels get sick and eventually die, they believe they’ve had a beautiful, transcendent religious experience, which has caused them to band together and create the Church of Angels, a creepy new religious movement that is basically taking over the world. The Church is great for the angels, because it’s like getting a free pass to the best buffet ever, and it’s gotten so good that they’ve decided to leave their crappy dying world/dimension and invade ours.
Alex is an AK, or Angel Killer, contracted by the CIA to hunt down angels and destroy them by shooting their halos to bits. He’s kind of a mix of Dean from Supernatural and Fenton/Adam from Frailty, right down to his driven nature, terrible childhood trained to kill things, and family issues. Willow is the other narrator of our story, a typical high schooler, except that she’s psychic and can awesomely fix your car when it breaks down. They meet when Alex is sent to kill Willow by an anonymous CIA text, but as it turns out, she’s only half-angel and he’s too busy trying to puzzle out how that’s possible to pull the trigger. This is lucky for both of them, because Willow may be the only one who can stop the coming Angel Invasion, and when the angels find out, both Alex and Willow have to go on the run.
If you predict that Alex and Willow dislike and distrust each other in the beginning and then eventually fall in love, you’d be right. Doesn’t the assassin always fall in love with his target in these books? Still, it’s handled pretty well; they start with basic lust because they’re both attractive teenagers trapped in a car and various seedy motels together, and through danger and saving each other’s lives every two seconds, grow into love. I believed it. Then they go too far and become annoyingly schmoopy, with declarations of endless devotion and whatnot, for far too long; it’s like the author decided, “now I must reinforce their feelings by forcing them to hole up in a cabin together where they have nothing to do but gaze into each other’s eyes and talk about how in love they are”. Meanwhile, the angels are all plotting their takeover, taking over the CIA and AKs and ensuring that their mind-controlled supporters are everywhere, and basically being a lot more proactive.
Happily, this "stuck in the cabin" section eventually ends and the more thrilling plot, whereby they attempt to stop the Angel Invasion, recommences. And it didn’t go quite where I expected (dammit, I should have seen this was a trilogy!).
Despite the book being all about the new religious movement that sprang up around the angels and how dangerous the power of belief can be (at least, when that belief is fueled by mind control), Weatherly doesn’t have to deal with the problems a lot of other “angel” books do: namely, God. It’s clear these angels are just another species, one escaping a dying world and trying to survive by any means necessary, and have nothing really to do with our human religions. This makes sense to me and is kinda cool. Angels have fooled humanity into trusting them by appearing as gleaming figures adorned with halos, wings, and flowing robes, and they exploit the religious fervor they leave in their wake, but they don’t believe in it. They’re like evil, self-serving magical con artists.
But here’s what I don’t quite get. All of this doesn’t explain why they think of themselves as angels, which they clearly do - they use the word “angelic” and “seraphic” and so on to describe their home world and its governing council, but for them, there are no religious connotations. I find it hard to divorce the words from the ideas behind them, so I can’t understand why beings from another world/dimension would refer to themselves using ideas and language from our world, the same way we would. They even refer to the damage they do to humans as “angel burn”, which seems odd to me - that seems like a term the hunters would have cooked up, and the angels themselves would have a different way of describing it. The point is, they aren’t really angels.
The only way I can really reconcile it is if the angels have been coming to our world for so long that they actually gave rise to their own mythology as religious figures. That’s kind of a cool notion, if the angels in the Bible and so on were actually aliens, controlling humanity even way back when, but it’s not one really supported by the book.
Anyway, none of this detracted from my enjoyment of the story. I puzzled about it, sure, but I let it go.
In truth, this is a classic story of invasion and colonization, with a twist that feels new even when it isn’t (I mean, aliens coming to this world because their world can no longer sustain them and tricking humanity into rolling over with a fight isn’t exactly a new story). It’s also a fairly decent paranormal romance between characters who are equals and who are both likable - they react like real people with believable motivations.
I'll be reading the next one just to see where the author takes the Angel Invasion plot.