What if the person you were meant to be with could never be yours?
17-year-old Lucinda falls in love with a gorgeous, intelligent boy, Daniel, at her new school, the grim, foreboding Sword & Cross . . . only to find out that Daniel is a fallen angel, and that they have spent lifetimes finding and losing one another as good & evil forces plot to keep them apart.
Get ready to fall . . .
After finally watching the Fallen movie, I realised I had forgotten soooooo much of its original plotline that I ran towards the shelves and took all four Fallen books.
It’s been such a long time that I last read Fallen, getting back to them now as a more experienced reader was weird… to say the least. I remember being completely nuts about this bookseries, going crazy over Cam and theorizing about stuff that I won’t talk about here because of SPOILERs….
PLUS, I remember hating Daniel Grigori with a passion which… hasn’t changed much.
Anyway… I refrained from reviewing Fallen on this platform because the bookseries does mean a lot to me. Even if it’s not at the same level as it used to be for me. Wherever it stands on my chaotic and unending favorite books list, it’s still the bookseries that got me into reading. Without Fallen, I don’t know where I would be regarding my reading habits and my passion for books and writing.
But I want to try and review it now. So here it goes:
Fallen is the first book in Lauren Kate’s The Fallen bookseries. It tells us the story of Lucinda Price who, after surviving a mysterious fire that killed her friend, was send to reform school. All her life she’s been haunted by things she calls ‘Shadows’ and because of that insanity, people around her believe her to be the one who started a fire and thus killing Trevor.
Luce settles into reform school quite quickly but still has lots to learn about her peers who might have done things much much worse than her reason for being at Sword&Cross. It’s difficult to befriend someone or think that the past won’t haunt her here, or that the Shadows will finally leave her alone…
Life is troublesome enough but things are about to become even more troublesome when Luce’s eye falls onto a very tall and very handsome blond guy who seems unrealistically familiar to her but for some reason only seems to push her away or piss her off.
And on her quest to find out why she feels a connection to him, or why he seems so extremely familiar, Luce might just find out more than she’s in for.
Reading this book for the first time was what launched me into a world of fangirling, fandoms, tumblr pages, staying up all night theorizing with other fans and spending loads of money on books, on trips to meet my favorite authors and so on.
Reading it again… It took a bit more effort than I thought it would. Especially since I’ve reread the series until the spine of my Fallen copy threatened to collapse, and I actually got out an bought another copy (which was signed by Lauren herself so F-yes for me).
For some reason, I found Luce very unlikeable this time round. As main character in a romance novel, she’s bound to be trapped by the love-triangle but this time it’s not one of the guys who made it annoying. It was Luce.
From the moment she sees Daniel, she’s all about him but when he gives her the cold-shower treatment she turns to Cam, who does nothing but show his affections. It’s a back and forth between them until the end of the books, which was excruciating to me.
There’s no real depth to Luce or the love she feels.
But apart from me not liking Luce, these books are still very dear to me and I love them with all my heart. The story, although a little simplistic as far as the writing goes, is still one of my favorites.
What I love most about the book is that Daniel and Luce’s curse has soo many elements and that almost all of them get established in this first installment. We don’t get to see all if it delved into yet, but we do get to see the tip of the iceberg.
It still doesn’t explain why the two lovers love each other enough to face thousands of years worth of heartbreak and so on, but I’ll chose to ignore that small shallow characterism.
The setting in the book is another thing I liked very much. For a romance book that is packed with blockades (Daniel being mean without a reason – nobody telling Luce anything about anything – Cam being all up in Luce’s face without an explanation) to keep you from the truth, Lauren manages to keep things light and airy by using characters like Ariane and Roland to blow off some steam or tension. Ariane, being sarcastic as hell and banter back and forth with others, made me smile after sitting through Luce moan about Daniel being a total ass or relishing in the fact that not one but two boys seem drawn to her.
I rated this book 3 out of 5 stars. I had it stand on 5 out of 5 but since I became a more experienced reader, I have to admit there are books out there that have raised the bar for a 5-star rating, therefore knocking this one to a 3-star rating.
I love the books to death but I’ve come to crave more descriptive writing, as well as wanting to read about two characters falling in love and giving me reasons why to like the love interest. And that’s not what this book does. It kind of tricks you into liking an insta-love… and I usually don’t like those 😦
With love,
Leanne
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