Benulis, Sabrina: Archon
Archon (2011)
Written by: Sabrina Benulis
Genre: Paranormal Fantasy
Pages: 222/385 (Hardcover)
Series: Book One (The Books of Raziel)
Why I Read It: one reason and one reason only. I know the author. Not well, mind you, but she was a semester ahead of me in at my master's program, and an early version of this book was her graduate thesis. I never read any of it, though I did attend her senior reading and heard an excerpt. When I saw the book at Hastings, I wanted to support the author anyway I could, and buying the book seemed to be the best way to do it.
The premise: ganked from publisher's website: There are some things worse than death . . .
For years, Angela Mathers has been plagued by visions of a supernatural being-an angel with beguiling eyes and magnificent wings who haunts her thoughts and seduces her dreams. Newly freed from a mental institution where she had been locked away for two years, Angela hopes that attending Westwood Academy, the Vatican’s exclusive university, will bring her peace and a semblance of normality.
But Angela isn’t normal. With her stain of dark red hair and alabaster skin, she is a blood head-a freak, a monster, and the possible fulfillment of a terrifying prophecy. Blessed with strange, mystical powers, blood heads hold a special place in the Academy. Among them, one special blood head is more powerful than them all: the Archon, the human reincarnation of the dead angel Raziel. And when the Archon arises as foretold, it will rule the supernatural universe.
Barely in control of her own life, Angela has no ambition to conquer an entire universe, not when she’s suddenly contending with a dangerous enemy who is determined to destroy her and a magnetic novitiate who wants to save her. But the choice might not be her own . . .
Torn between mortal love and angelic obsession, the young blood head must soon face the truth about herself and her world. It is she who holds the key to Heaven and Hell-and both will stop at nothing to possess her.
In Archon, Sabrina Benulis has created a dazzlingly imaginative tale set in a lush, vivid supernatural world filled with gargoyles and candlelight, magic and murder, in which humans, angels, demons, and those in between battle for supremacy-and survival.
Spoilers, yay or nay?: Yay to a point. Even though this book ended up being a DNF for me, I got quite far, so I'll go ahead and use a cut before wrapping up. HOWEVER, I do spoil a major plot point for N.K. Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, so please don't read THIS review if you haven't yet read THAT book. Just skip to "My Rating" and you'll be good. Everyone else, onward!
I struggled a LOT with this book. I kept debating whether or not to power through or just slap the DNF label on it and be done with it, but every time I entertained the latter, I felt bad. After all, I know the author. So I kept having that inner debate while trolling Amazon for reviews (it's never a good sign if I'm reading reviews about the book instead of the book itself) and trying to figure out why this book wasn't working for me.
For starters, there was one reason I bought the book. I know the author. That's it. Forget the pretty cover: the premise didn't interest me, and the early, very negative reviews worried me. If I hadn't known the author, I would have never picked up this book. This was my first clue I should put it aside.
I also found that the writing style didn't click with me, and because it didn't click, I couldn't connect to the world or the characters or the story itself, which kept me at a distance every time I tried reading a few pages. This was my second clue.
The third clue, the thing that made me realize there was no way I could finish this book and review it on its own terms, was reading a one-star review on Amazon that kind of condensed the mythology driving the story. In short, three angels were are IN CONTROL, two male, one female, and one of the males hooks up with the female, leaving the other male feeling left out and jealous, a MAJOR WAR ensues and the lover boy dies (suicide in this case) but a teeny part of him is somehow preserved and that part is what fuels the prophecy that he will return, in the form of a human.
I think there are other details I could add in, but when I read this, I involuntarily let out an expletive because I'd already read this book.
No, not this book.
N.K. Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms.
Now, I need to make a few things clear: I am not accusing the author of copying or stealing or any such nonsense. More than anyone, I get what it means to be a writer, and I get that sometimes, people kind of latch on to the same ideas independently of each other, write their own little stories, and inevitably, one gets published before the other. While Jemisin was published back in 2010, I know that Benulis was working on Archon as early as 2005, if not earlier. I also know that Jemisin is not an alum of Seton Hill, where Benulis workshopped her book. Whether or not the two authors know each other isn't something I know, but I think it's pretty reasonable that this core idea, this core plot, isn't unique to either author.
What is unique is the direction the two authors decided to go in, because everything about the two books is utterly different.
If you haven't read my review for the Hugo and Nebula-nominated The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, you can do so here. But in short, Jemisin features a fantasy world that is rich in diversity and peoples of color, with a heroine of color, and there's no prophecies or any such things that indicate Yeine, the heroine, is chosen to do anything. With the exception of her place in her family, where she's actually chosen to die, but let's just say the gods had a way of interfering. As a reader, I had no idea that Yeine would be reborn as the goddess Enefa, even though in hindsight, it was painfully obvious something was up.
In contrast, Benulis' world is almost definitely populated with white people, with a white heroine and white adversaries. I vaguely remember seeing a description of someone of color, but honestly, I can't remember if that person was a demon or not, which would be a whole other kettle of fish. Benulis focuses on the prophecy: a blood head (read: red head) which will prove to the be human incarnation of Raziel and will rule the supernatural universe. Or something. I'm actually pulling that from the jacket flap, because the book is painfully adhering to the adage of "show, don't tell" which means the reader has to piece everything together from the precious little detail Benulis provides, and even then, it's not until near page 200. Which is troublesome, because while I certainly don't mind putting things together, I feel like I need something, anything, to roll with. In other words, something that earns my trust immediately so I can be manipulated later. Jemisin did this on the very first page in four sentences. It never happens here.
Part of the problem is that the reader is dumped in medias res, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. The trouble here though was that not only did I feel like I was missing a vital part of story, even from the start, but I had a strange suspicion that I should be well-versed in Catholicism in order to understand Benulis' world-building and all the twists and turns she was making. Thankfully, I could at least appreciate the Lucifer = Lucifel twist, which makes Lucifel a woman, and is a nice twist on the expectations. Beyond that, my Protestant childhood didn't prepare me very well.
I made mention about feeling like I missed a story before this: part of it's the setting. In the pages I read, we never see anything outside of this island (?) of Luz, so I don't have a real sense of where this fantasy world is in relation to, say, the United States or Europe or even Earth. Now don't get me wrong: there's such a thing as secondary world fantasy, which needs no relation to Earth as I know it, but when it's an obviously modern to futuristic setting, and when the setting itself is so damn miserable and fraught with decay, I had to wonder: what's the rest of the world like? Where did Angela come from? We know she wants to die: she's tried suicide multiple times and hasn't succeeded even when she should have (more on this in a minute), and we can infer that she had a rotten childhood and therefore was justified in her actions.
Only… not so much. For all Benulis' desire to show instead of tell, the suicide issue, even though it's only a portion of the book, is a fatal blow to Angela's character. Because it's not that she wants to die because of horrible things done to her (though I'm sure that fuels it, and please, don't ask me what those horrible things are: it's all inferred rather than told, so I really, really don't know), but because she can't escape visions of a GORGEOUS ANGEL in her dreams, and she's convinced that if she dies? She'll be with her GORGEOUS ANGEL.
Which made me note: "This girl is worse than Bella Swan."
At least Bella Swan wasn't trying to die -- she was just aiming for the adrenaline rush that brought her visions of her beloved but absent Edward.
Moving on.
For such a striking character trait, it's not a sympathetic one. And please understand, I'm not saying it's a bad one, necessarily, though it does raise the question of what kind of message this book is sending to its younger readers (want to be with the guy you love? KILL YOURSELF!!!!). Okay, maybe that's alarmist, and Harper Voyager isn't a YA imprint, but the author herself has stated that she envisions this book for readers sixteen and up, and I hope to God those sixteen and up readers recognize stupidity when they see it.
But my deal, personally, is that the character trait isn't earned. I never see Angela go through hell. And while I'm told that blood heads have it rough, I never see it, because at the Academy, blood heads are celebrated. So instead of really empathizing with Angela, instead of making me believe as she does, that she'll be with her Angel once she dies, I think she's a moron, and that's not a great way to endure me to her character.
I should stress, though, that as the book goes on, she stops the suicide attempts. So that's better. Though we're still at a loss as to why she's so enchanted by this angel in her visions. Even the author pokes fun at this on page 205 (a sentence I liked because I agreed with it, and it fits so many urban fantasy heroines):
This angel, a creature of such power, could crack her spine with a snap of his fingers, and yet Angela had fallen into his embrace brainless and lovesick, an idiot without equal, just like she imagined over and over and over again.
Some other things Benulis does well: it's obvious she's got talent on a technical level, but sometimes (and I'm sorry, I don't mean this to be a backhanded compliment), I wondered if the talent could see the forest through the trees. In other words, sometimes I got the impression that every sentence was so carefully rendered that the bigger picture got lost. After all, the world-building -- as bleak and dark as it is -- is rather unique, and I haven't seen Benulis' take on angels before. This is rich with promise, but something was lost in translation, and many times, even on the page where I stopped reading, I felt like everyone else knew what was going on but me, but I wasn't left with the kind of curiosity that made me want to turn the pages (and there was that whole Jemisin comparison too).
But another good thing is that Benulis gives Angela two friends outside of a love interest, and those friends are FEMALE! And they talk about things OTHER than guys (though Kim, the crush-worthy object, does come up). Right on for girl power! Though I did have a bit of a whiplash moment when I read the chapter where Kim (a guy) is talking to Troy (a female djinn). It's a name thing, and I know Kim can be a masculine name, but it still gave me whiplash. :)
Target audience is an odd issue here. I mentioned earlier that Benulis intends her book for ages 16 and older. I'm also pretty sure that the Academy is a college of sorts, and if not that, a very private, expensive boarding school. So we have a book that is NOT YA but feels like YA being marketed to both adult and YA readers, and that left me with a kind of odd focus. The ages of the characters shouldn't matter, and some of my favorite books last year were YA fantasies where the youth of the character was irrelevant to the story at hand. But this is the second DNF I've had in less than thirty days that featured college-aged kids, and there's something about that tone, about that transition between youth and adulthood, that just isn't clicking for me. This may be a "me-issue" and others may not have this problem, but I want to stress: this book is NOT marketed towards YA readers. So my concerns about how appropriate a suicidal heroine is for the target audience is moot, right? But still, it's almost as if this book is straddling between two worlds without really firmly embracing one or the other. For example, it could've been solely YA with some tinkering and that focus in mind, or it could've been adult (though short of aging up the characters, not sure how one would escape the YA assumption, and getting out of the Academy means trashing the plot, so… ). Anyway, it was weird for me.
The book also breaks my personal rule of "one POV per 100 pages" (which I didn't come up with until long after I graduated), with at least five POVs in 222 pages, two of which didn't strike me as necessary at all (especially the prologue's, I mean, chapter zero's), but I will note my rule is a personal thing. I want to be able to latch on to characters and really experience the story through their eyes, and the more POVs I get, the less I'm able to do so, unless, of course, you're writing a monster epic like A Song of Ice and Fire.
My Rating: Problematic, but Promising (DNF)
Although it should read "Promising, but Problematic," which sounds the same, but is very different in my mind. The former indicates the book is worth completing, the latter explains why one puts it down. But in truth, this is the kind of book where your mileage may vary, because certainly, Benulis seems to have a unique world and slightly disturbing take on angels, but for me, the more pages I read, the more I resented the fact that information was being withheld from me, and I didn't know what was going on or why (and when I'm 163 pages from the end, that's not good). Sometimes, there's a fine line between show and tell, when you can show something but tell just enough so that the reader definitely gets it. Then again, it depends on the reader, and maybe I just wasn't up to the task of reading this book (if that's the case, it was an off-day, because if I can get through Valente? I can get through this), but all that being said, I never connected, and it's my own fault for buying the book to begin with, which I did in support of the author, rather than interest in the premise itself. So I'll take the blame here, and hope that the author, once she's done with this trilogy, will release something (novel or short story) that I can sink my teeth into later. I wish her the best, but it wasn't for me, and that's okay. As for the rest of you, all I can suggest is reading a sample and seeing how it fits you. If the premise excites you and the writing engages you, go for it. I definitely want to see the author do well, even if this doesn't work for me. :)
Cover Commentary: It's quite an eye-catching cover. The reds really, really pop, though there's something about the pose of Angela on the cover that's awkward to me. Maybe it's just that the red of her hair isn't a natural red, so it makes me wonder what else isn't realistic. ;) That being said, it's still a gorgeous, eye-catching cover. :) Borja Fresco Costal is also the same artist do did Blood Rights and Anna Dressed in Blood, and that I recognized the style before confirming the artist behind each piece says artist definitely has a recognizable style. Though… it's telling that all three covers feature the backs of women and lush, flowing hair. :-/
Next up: Shadow Man by Melissa Scott