Customer Reviews

Angelology: A Novel

5 star:		(86)
4 star:		(46)
3 star:		(47)
2 star:		(50)
1 star:		(50)

 

 

For some reason "Angelology" caught my attention on this vine list. A whole secret sect dedicated to studying and protecting the world from the secret offspring of angels and man? Very cool. Add in some biblical references and ancient mythology and you got your story.

Or you should.

This novel revolves around the premise that there is a long standing organization of angelologists who study the angels and work against their hybrid children the Nephilim, who are constantly struggling to exert their superior place in the world by ruling humanity through any number of schemes. This organization has schools and institutions for teaching new recruits (from every religion and sphere of spiritual and secular life) and they do what they can to learn how to defeat the Nephilim and have been doing so for a long, long time.

Our story begins in 1999 at the New York Convent of St. Rose where Sister Evangeline, the twenty three year old orphaned daughter of two angelologists, has lived since she was twelve. Evangeline has blocked out most of the odd occurrences in her childhood but when a modern art scholar from NYC named Verlaine shows up in the convent archives (which boast a mass library of angelic images and texts) looking for information that the former Abbess of the convent was once in communication with Abigail Rockefeller it sparks her interest.

The letter she finds leads her to one of the eldest sisters in the convent, who tells the tale of her days as a young angelology student in Paris before WW2-and the expedition to the cave where the angels who fathered the Nephilim were cast down from heaven and imprisoned in to find the lyre of Orpheus-which both sides in the conflict believe has great power to aid their cause. This nun also studied with Evangeline's grandmother-who has written a series of letters to Evangeline to be opened when the time is right, explaining the ancient situation she finds herself in the middle of.

Verlaine doesn't know it but the man he's working for, Percival Grigori is a Nephilim-a powerful one searching for the lyre to restore his ailing heath. Verlaine has no idea angels exists at all in fact. But soon he is caught up as the angelologists, with Evangeline race to discover the hidden Lyre before the Nephilim can find it.

That's our story. The "present" parts of it take place over two days. Or less.

This could have been fascinating if anything was ever explained. The origins of angelology for example-never really mentioned. How one finds out or becomes part of this world-nada. Any kind of real history about the main characters is mostly absent too-as is any kind of information to make sense of this novel! There is just so much missing-so much description, so much information! If the concept of angelology was like-I don't know-the KKK maybe (in terms of fame) then the level of explanation might be adequate but as it the plot is barely capable of being followed. And the characters themselves are just shadows with no substance (except for the repeated mentions of Verlaine's snazzy tie and the brand of boxers he prefers.) The author does manage to convey a great sense of urgency but once you reach the end it all falls apart into a big mess. And the end! If this is not part of a planned series then it makes even less sense that I think it does.

This book hits a conundrum. There isn't enough information to explain the basic concepts but in order for there to be enough there would have to be several, much longer, books. Maybe a series that starts at the beginning or has a flashback system that makes more sense than the one big block of past in the middle of the book.

Frankly I'm lost. I enjoyed the overall concept (which I don't understand very well), liked parts of the book (but was incredibly frustrated by their lack of detail and sense of weight) and am stuck with an overall feeling that there are huge sections of this novel floating around in the either which could bring it all together and make it better (not that it wouldn't help the constant clichés when it comes to any kind of relationship involved) and more readable.

I hate giving bad reviews. Especially to first time authors. I didn't like this book but I was absorbed by it. I can see why someone would buy the movie rights to the concept (congrats to the author by the way) but I don't see how this, as is, could be a movie. Overall this book I think, was just too ambitious for it's limitations (especially page length) and that made the whole thing awkward and confusing yet strangely appealing.

Two stars.

This was such a great idea. It's a shame that the book is so horribly written. Some suspension of disbelief is required for fiction, but "Angelology" requires the literary equivalent of the Brooklyn Bridge. The characters act like they're such unfathomable idiots - a secret organization studying angels uses ANGEL for its cars license plates! they have the most important of meetings in an apartment their opponents know about! someone with a Ph.D. in art history does not know that "ex" is "from" in Latin! - that it is impossible to believe that any plot they engaged in could succeed. The characters also have only emotionally matured to about the level of the average fourteen year old. Their "does s/he like me?" musings are just as boring in this book as they are in real life. Maybe some day someone will write an interesting book about interactions between humans and angels, but this sure isn't it.

The early reviews of this book - and the critic's reviews here on Amazon made it sound like a great read - an original engaging story, positive comments on the author's writing style, etc.

I expected a far-fetched tale, but hoped for a well-written book full of engaging characters, brisk plot and historical and biblical details that would make the concept of angeology real. Nope. The writing style was clumsy at best. The author tells you how you should think and feel about the characters, which is at odds with the impressions you get of these people based on their words and deeds. As a result, you cannot care about them - not one.

There are just so many things in the book that make no sense. I am not referring to the existence of an evil race of quasi-angel Nephilim who have been enslaving and corrupting humanity since several of God's angels mated with humans before the Flood, nor the existence of a secret academic/action hero society dedicated to fighting the Nephilim. That was the intriquing stuff. The stuff that makes no sense is the real-world details that would make the fantasy believeable.

The main events of the story take place over the course of two days or so right before Christmas in and around NYC. The only references to Christmas -- even in the convent --- are the Christmas cookies the nuns bake and Verlaine's dislike of the holiday. These folks somehow manage to dash around New York City and its environs without ever being hampered by traffic, construction or the like. They find thelselves in a mostly empty subway car late in the afternoon on Christmas Eve - where is everyone?. The main action takes place in 1999. Not a single character has a cell phone. No one seems to have access to the internet. While not as common in 1999 as these modern marvels are now, they certainly existed - Verlaine has a laptop into which his has scanned important documents - he freelances as a researcher - but no internet? No cell phone?

Then there are the interal incnsistencies. The author tells us that humans are inherently good and it is the Nephilim who have corrupted them. Yet in the parts of the book where there are crowds (and the author is a fan of hiding things in crowds) the people comprising those crowds do not react to any of the bad stuff going on around them. The human "good guys" are amoral throughout the book - killing, lying, committing adulery, stealing. Ironic - the premise of angelology is that evil was released into the world when God's will was defied.

As the climax unfolds in the last third of the book, most of the characters' decisions make no sense - without spoling too much - they set themselves a task with no purpose and then go about it blindly, trusting everyone they meet, resulting in a needlessly high body-count. At this point, the whole thing degenerates into a comic book style birth of a super hero ... on Christmas. You have got to be kidding me.

I cannot comprehend the glowing critical reviews of the writing of this book. The written prose, the dialogue and the charcater / plot development were in draft form at best.

The book has been compared to the Da Vinci Code, and it is in that genre, but the author is not able to sustain the pace of the plot as Dan Brown does, nor does she manage to explain the very intriguing concept of angelology withour resorting to long lectures. The concept is more interesting than those Dan Brown comes up with, and is not as overtly anti-religious as Brown, but she is just not the writer that Brown is.

Angelology is anti-religious in its own way. The main character is a nun living in a convent - but she is naive and wasn't given much of a choice about joining, never gives any thought to her faith or spirituality, rather, focuses only on the routine of her existence within the convent. She is the only young nun there - the author explains that vocations to the religious life have fallen off since parents stopped coercing their children. There is more, but that would spoil some of the action if you plan to read the book.

I gave the book 2 stars for it's original concept, but I do not recommend it. Clearly this is heading for sequels - I won't be reading them.

Two very different New York Times Books reviews --one by a Janet Maudlin and another by a Suzann Cokeall-- convinced me that Angelology was, indeed, a book with an intriguing premise. I wasn't expecting His Dark Materials --indeed, books of that caliber come but once or twice in a lifetime--, but I can be very forgiving when it comes to genres like fantasy and science-fiction. I never expected my forgiveness to be so severely tested.

In the very first paragraph of the very first page (of the very first chapter), we are told that Sister Evangeline wakes up, takes her clothes to the common bathroom, and quietly dresses without looking at herself in the mirror. Second paragraph: Sister Evangeline removes her nightgown and gazes at her decidedly un-sexy underwear in the mirror. Huh? Hadn't she just dressed barely a paragraph before? Third paragraph: she puts on her clothes! And that is just the first page --of 452.

A book? This is a stinking mess. We are told that Percival Grigori's uncle was born in the seventeenth century, and that he died an untimely death "in his fifth century." I wasn't aware that five whole centuries had passed between the 1600s and the 1900s. There is a Cyrillic inscription that plays a big part in the novel, but that dates from a moment in history when the Cyrillic alphabet was barely starting to develop. The Nazis, the Nephilim, Orpheus, Darwin (apparently Darwinism was conceived by the evil Nephilim to lead the human race astray!), everything and the kitchen sink is thrown into this hodgepodge, drowning a concept that could have been interesting in oceans of incoherence.

Science fiction and fantasy are not necessarily the best arenas for character development (although they can be: just read Ursula Leguin), but I have rarely encountered a more brittle, paper-thin throng of featureless people. (Paper-thin and paper-white, to the point that even the overindulgent Ms. Maudlin feels obliged to note: "In a book whose characters are either white, very white or so white as to have nacreous fingernails and give off an otherworldly glow, these attitudes generate more unease than the author may have intended.") And don't get me started on the plot --or lack thereof. Or the prose --compared to her, Dan Brown is a stylist. I could go on. And on, and on.

That Ms. Trussoni is well connected in the publishing world is plain --otherwise this abomination would not have seen the light of day. That no editor was able to detect so many inconsistencies in the first page of this detritus --well, you can blame it on the economy. But that two different NYTB critics had the chutzpa to skim through this garbage and call it "prettily written" and "a terrifically clever thriller" is disturbing --and truly unacceptable.

I'm really trying to find something positive to say about Danielle Trussoni's Angelology, but to be honest, I really can't think of much of anything. Which means this will be a pretty quick review as I'm not much of a fan of belaboring why a bad book is a bad book (realizing of course that "bad" is pretty subjective).
Angelology is the first book in a series detailing the ongoing battle that has raged since the time of Noah between the "Nephilim" (a hybrid race of angels/humans) and humanity. The Nephilim arose when a group of angels--the Watchers--mated with human women. For this, they were imprisoned by God in a deep cavern. The Nephilim, however, remained and at first pretty much enslaved mankind, then when God wiped the Earth clean, one of them snuck aboard the Ark, allowing the race to continue, though now they dominated humanity more behind the scenes as kings and queens and aristocrats, then as the wealthy elite or politically powerful (for instance, they were behind the Nazis). Because the Nephilim, for some reason, have continued to mate with humans, they've tainted their line and are diminishing as a race and individually via sickness. Move to present time and a young nun, Sister Evangeline, who ends up involved in modern day plots by the Nephilim to cure themselves and return to domination and the Angelologists--the group of humans who have opposed them for millennia (Madame Curie, Augustine, and lots of other really famous people). Along with following Evangeline, we flash back to the 1930's and a group of Angelologists that includes Evangeline's grandmother.
The plot is excessively convoluted and often simply fails to make sense. Not in "what is happening" fashion but in the "why is this happening" way. Time and again one finds oneself saying "but wouldn't . . . " or "couldn't they just have . . . " Too many events seem arbitrary, too many motivations are muddy, too many situations are complex for complexity's sake (complexity often highlighted by the often too-simple resolutions that follow).
The mythology and backstories are offered up in clunky exposition--characters reminisce over events in convenient narrative, chronological fashion; lecture (literally) other characters. ask questions they already know the answers to, conveniently overhear expository conversation, read letters and journals.
Few of the characters are compelling; Evangeline is especially weak which is too bad since she carries much of the book. Her male cohort, Verlaine, is equally pale. As for the "villain"--the Nephilim Percival Grigori--it's hard to even think of him as such as because he's so inept. The Nephilim veer from allegedly terrifyingly powerful creatures to the bad guys in Home Alone. When the "big battle" is a group of near-angels taking on a convent of nuns, and the near-angels lose in the space of a few sentences, you know you're in some narrative trouble. The exception is the WWII flashback with Evangeline's grandmother and her rival Celestine (one of the nuns)--here the characters are more alive, though this is tainted both by characters being implausibly oblivious and uncommunicative and by that same clunky exposition.
The book tries to turn into a puzzle quest at the near-end, but it moves solely between absurdly arcane/elaborate and absurdly simple. Afterward, it closes with one of the most muddy and anti-climactic confrontations I've read.
In the end, Angelology falls far short in nearly every element: character, plot, premise, etc. Trussoni has written an acclaimed memoir, but the move to fiction appears to have been a move too far, at least with her first novel. Not recommended

I'm not the biggest fan of Dan Brown, so perhaps I should have been wary of ANGELOLOGY by Danielle Trussoni from the start. After all, many of the reviews mention its similarity to the Brown novels. But there is something about Dan Brown I like, which made me think Angelology would be worth a try: the incorporation of many real or imagined historical and geographical elements into a work of pure fiction, wrapped in an exciting if not erudite package. While Brown does deliver on this, Trussoni does not, making Angelology, at best, a second-rate rainy day read.

For all its faults, Angelology would not have been half so disappointing if it did not pretend to be something its not. It makes itself out to be so interesting, you see, with all its promises of Bulgarian topography, Biblical messages, pseudo-theology, mythology... the list goes on. But Trussoni's mistake in the actual text is that she fails to truly incorporate these elements, focusing too much on arbitrary details. I don't even want to know the exact number of times she mentioned Verlaine's Hermes tie and vintage shoes, or Evangeline's habit (and, really, with a habit you'd wonder how much detail there even was to focus on, anyway). I get it, Verlaine's a disorganized, artsy hipster and Evangeline's a sweet, naive nun. But there are better ways to get that through. The character's speech and actions, for instance. But none of this came across. Instead, Trussoni simply told us what each character was like without really showing us.

Not that the plot isn't interesting at all. It's still somewhat action-y and, though it's not what you'd call unputdownable, you certainly won't put it down for very long. For all my confused feelings about the characterization, writing style, and plot devices, I still kind of wanted to know what happened. But Angelology is also a very obvious set-up for a sequel, so don't expect an ending with any kind of closure. It leaves you completely hanging. If you don't mind that, it's not that bad as a light read when you're feeling bored and not in the mood for something more serious. Its not worthy of the high praise it's been receiving from some professional reviewers, but its not terrible as long as you don't go in with high expectations. Take it for what it is and you might enjoy it. Somewhat recommended for anyone looking for a diversion at 2.5 stars.

I had great hopes for this book. Great reviews, intriguing subject matter,and an increasingly popular topic. Unfortunately I had to make myself finish the book. I skimmed large passages because they were so wordy and unnecessary. The book failed on a number of levels for me; I had no real feelings for the characters- neither the heroes nor the villains. Some details seemed to lead nowhere, and the ending was unsatisfying. The book could have easily been pared down by a hundred pages and have lost nothing in the process. I feel sure that a good movie producer will make substantial changes to the original material and probably come up with a much more exciting product.

I read this because the New York Times Book Review lauded it to the heavens. It probably rates among the top five worst books I have ever read. And I didn't read Bridges of Madison County.

I am almost halfway through this book, and I don't believe I can finish it--which is unusual for me because I never put a book down. The concept had such promise! I looked forward to the publication of this book, just based on the plot line. The pacing moves by inches. Explanations of the angel origins and history are repeated and repeated until I wanted to shout, "I know already!" The language is mundane. The author takes ages to describe the simplest actions, and not effectively, nor in any literary way that might compensate for the lack of action. This story could be a blockbuster and a movie in the hands of a better author. I am so disappointed.

This Author may have had an interesting idea but the publisher's rush to print to catch the wave of Vampire/Mythological/Faux Religious related sales certainly squashed it. The fact that the book is so poorly written is the fault of the people who are supposed to EDIT things prior to publication. This is actually painful to read up until about page 88 and then it is as if the absent editor came back from lunch and skimmed the rest. The worst thing about it is how odviously it is a set-up for another to follow! And a movie deal etc. etc. Enough is enough already.