Angel Falling Softly [Paperback]

Eugene Woodbury (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 30, 2008

Over the past six months, Rachel Forsythe's perfect life has descended from the ideal to the tragic. The younger of her two daughters is dying of cancer. Despite her standing as the wife of a respected Mormon bishop, neither God nor medical science has blessed her with a cure. Or has He? Milada Daranyi, chief investment officer at Daranyi Enterprises International, has come to Utah to finalize the takeover of a Salt Lake City-based medical technology company. Bored with her downtown hotel accommodations, she rents a house in the Salt Lake City suburbs. And then the welcome wagon shows up. Her neighbors perceive her to be a beautiful, intelligent, and daunting young woman. But Rachel senses something about Milada that leads her in a completely different-and very dangerous-direction. Rachel's suspicions are right: Milada is homo lamia. A vampire. Fallen. And possibly the only person in the world who can save Rachel's daughter. Uncovering Milada's secrets, Rachel becomes convinced that, as Milton writes, "all this good of evil shall produce." As the two women push against every moral boundary in order to protect their families, the price of redemption will prove higher than either of them could have possibly imagined.

Product Details

• Paperback: 236 pages
• Publisher: Zarahemla Books (June 30, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0978797167
• ISBN-13: 978-0978797164
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,039,084 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Eugene Woodbury graduated from Brigham Young University with degrees in Japanese and TESOL. He has twice been a Utah Original Writing Competition finalist and is a recipient of the Sunstone Foundation Moonstone Award for short fiction. He lives in Orem, Utah, where he works as a free-lance writer and translator.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hardly a Mockery, August 9, 2008

By 

Sister-Kate-to-Jane-in-Spirit "Adopted Austen" (Portland, ME) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Angel Falling Softly (Paperback)

I consider calling Angel Falling Softly a mockery (of Mormonism, LDS doctrine, LDS culture) to be odd in the extreme. It is, in fact, a story about a woman's relationship with God; it is the furthest thing from a mockery. People who covenant with God are usually not squeaky-clean individuals carrying out squeaky-clean agendas with squeaky-clean results. Such men and women are real, flawed individuals who fight and argue and weep and (even) bargain with God. God, as He points out to Job, is big enough to take it; so is the God of Angel Falling Softly (nowhere in the novel does the narrator/author state that any of the characters know God's mind absolutely and are thus, automatically, carrying out God's will). Redemption doesn't happen easily. It doesn't happen over night. It doesn't happen in 236 pages, and it certainly doesn't happen without people making some fairly awful decisions to begin with.

SPOILER ALERT:

In fact, the book ends on a remarkably judicious note. Characters who were heading in a spiritually unhealthy direction, end facing in a spiritually healthier direction. I am not referring to Rachel, who pays a serious and heart-breaking price for her decision. What God thinks of that decision, the author humbly does not attempt to answer.

In conclusion, and getting to the vampire element of the novel, I consider the assumption that Rachel, for all her flaws and justifications, has "damned" her child to be faintly ridiculous. The original Dracula by Bram Stoker does link vampires to damnation and is about as replete with sexual imagery and allusions as a Victorian novel can be, but it hardly makes sense to refute the sexual link yet adopt Stoker's theory of damnation. Nowhere does the author imply that Miladi is anything more or less than a flawed, even sinful, daughter of God who has managed to overcome (to a degree) a horrific past. Nor does the author imply that her condition is anything more than a rather troubling disability (and, yes, seemingly unending mortality can be a troubling disability, a view that is in keeping with LDS doctrine). I agree with previous reviewers that the description of Miladi's "disease" is incomplete. I also agree that the sex scenes may seem overly detailed (as an active Mormon, I did not find them troubling, but I realize others might) although I consider them necessary to the plot and to character development. However, I find previous reviewers' apparent disgust and anger that Angel is somehow deceptive to be unfair to the author, the publisher and to the true hardiness and depth of LDS doctrine.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Several very positive reviews, July 26, 2008

By 

Christopher Bigelow (Provo, UT United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Angel Falling Softly (Paperback)

Here's a collection of reviews from several well-respected authors and critics:

William Morris, founder of the literary blog A Motley Vision: Mormon Arts and Culture:

In melding the vampire genre with Mormon literary fiction, Eugene Woodbury has created a hybrid that is startling, fresh, insightful, and heartbreaking.

What's remarkable about Angel Falling Softly isn't just that Woodbury does something new with vampire themes or that he provides a complex, touching portrait of a Mormon mother desperately trying to save her terminally ill child. It's that he weaves these elements together with well-deployed literary allusions and quotations (often Biblical) that add substance to the questions raised about belief, redemption, desire, sin and death.

The novel is insistently literary while being solidly genre-based. What most amazed me is that he pulls it all off without violating the supernatural and metaphysical boundaries of Mormonism or of the vampire genre. He plays the two worlds against each other in a way that maximizes reading pleasure and says something new about the Mormon experience.

Angela Hallstrom, author of the novel Bound on Earth:

This tale of two women--one a vampire, the other a bishop's wife--is more than a good read. It is a provocative meditation on life and death that will leave readers both satisfied and unnerved. It kept me reading, and it kept me guessing.

C. L. Hanson, blogger and novelist:

Woodbury captures human relationships with realism and depth of feeling. He also paints a warm and homey portrait of Utah Mormon culture as seen from a sophisticated worldly perspective. All this is woven into a suspense-filled tale of a dangerous friendship as two women--born lifetimes apart--find the desperate courage to bet it all.

Moriah Jovan, novelist:

This isn't just a vampire story. It's a character study of the things Latter-day Saints might do when pushed into a corner with no apparent way out. The theme of the entire book can be summed up in one line: "Christians claim to believe in eternal life. So why are you so afraid of death?" Woodbury does nothing the easy or expected way in this story. There are a lot of questions and almost no answers--and I liked that. More, please.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Flair and Fangs, March 19, 2010

By 

Brett E. Wilcox (Sitka, AK United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Angel Falling Softly (Paperback)

Angel Falling Softly contains extraordinary writing and fine storytelling. Eugene Woodbury's brilliance and depth of knowledge is clearly evident. However, mixing LDS fiction with vampire fiction limits its appeal to a narrow audience. Congratulations to Woodbury for pulling off this bizarre combination of genres with flair and fangs.