ARC Review: Fallen

Lauren Kate
Fallen (Fallen #1)
Delacorte Books for Young Readers
ISBN-10: 0385738935
ISBN-13: 978-0385738934
Young adult fantasy
December 8, 2009

There’s something achingly familiar about Daniel Grigori.

Mysterious and aloof, he captures Luce Price’s attention from the moment she sees him on her first day at the Sword & Cross boarding school in sultry Savannah, Georgia. He’s the one bright spot in a place where cell phones are forbidden, the other students are all screw-ups, and security cameras watch every move.Even though Daniel wants nothing to do with Luce–and goes out of his way to make that very clear–she can’t let it go.

Drawn to him like a moth to a flame, she has to find out what Daniel is so desperate to keep secret . . . even if it kills her.

Dangerously exciting and darkly romantic, Fallen is a page turning thriller and the ultimate love story.

As reviewed for Amazon Vine, with some embellishments. And some spoilers. But I’ll label that section prior to stating them.

Before I get into why I thought the book was good – and why I also thought it came out a hot mess – I have got to hand it to the art team for that cover. Wow, now that is gorgeous…too bad it has nothing to do with the contents. The blurb is even intriguing, although it makes Luce come off as desperate, and while it does accurately represent the book, exciting isn’t exactly the word I’d use. Puzzling fits my experience more.

When a book starts off this interestingly, I’m a happy little reader. I settled in with Fallen, loving its almost rich descriptions of the utter desolation that has become Luce’s life. I mean, the school she is eventually sent to after an unfortunate incident is alive in its dreary, desperate loneliness. I could feel the Spanish moss and blanketing dark gray surrounding everything. The author immediately sets up a terrific atmosphere for the book and its characters, of which Luce is the constant center. For heavens sakes, even their attire – of which only the color black is allowed – lends itself well to the book’s atmosphere.

Essentially, Luce has been sent to a reform school, after having spent a life pursued by mysterious and sometimes malevolent “shadows” and therefore on pretty heavy antipsychotic drugs as a result. She’s not actually committed any crimes, but her possible involvement in a tragedy has her sentenced to Sword & Cross anyway, where she’s quickly surrounded by odd classmates and even odder urges that she knows one of the male students. She can’t stop the feeling that she knows Daniel Grigori (ring the alarm, that last name is telling), and even though she constantly questions these feelings and urges, she decides to pursue them and find out what is really between them.

Daniel, in the meantime, tries to turn Luce off the best ways he can, in general by being a jerk. I have to admit – even when Daniel wasn’t being a jerk, I didn’t get the attraction between these two. With the exception of one scene between them at the end of the book, in which some romance seemed to come out of nowhere, Daniel has about as much personality as sawdust. While I vaguely understood the basics behind his standoffish behavior, his and Luce’s romance and love that supposedly has withstood – wait, cannot go on with that till later in the review. Suffice to say, I felt absolutely no chemistry between these two until the very end. We are told why and it is hinted at all throughout the book as to why they should be in love, but it’s never especially demonstrated. There was really only one scene, and Luce “melts” at his words, but this comes after hundreds of pages of her not knowing why she likes, then loves him. Although she questions these inexplicable urges, she doesn’t exactly put up too much of a fuss about it. It always seemed as if, when she finally would make strides in finding out who Daniel was, she would revert back to the unquestioning, melting-at-Daniel Luce.

A secondary character named Camden is another story, though. The only thing I’ll say about him at this point, is he appears to be “on the other side”. The proverbial bad boy, he steals kisses from Luce, pursues her and basically does everything Daniel does not. It’s no wonder Luce looks at Cam as having more romantic potential. But then comes that pesky inner voice of hers. The voice that never once gives her any concrete information, yet she cannot help but prefer Daniel. Yet she finds Cam attractive too. Back and forth, revolving door plot and by the time anything really starts to happen – at about page 302 (oh yes, after hundreds of pages of almost nothing happening, I flagged when it finally became interesting again) – confusion reigns and the hot mess engages.

Arriane, another student with her own set of quirks, wild looks and take-charge airs, is just about one of the only interesting characters in the book…who eventually seems to disappear till almost the end. I liked her personality. In fact, she may have had the most personality of them all. The clues as to what the big secrets are seemed to be peppered all throughout the book, and I pretty much guessed who and what Arriane was ahead of time.

Given what happens in the prologue, which is set in 1854 England, we immediately get a huge insight into an important aspect of this book. Oh, and speaking of huge, right-up-front important aspects, take a hard look at that title again. Yep, you got it, if you’re thinking in any way of that great big expanse acting as nature’s top hat. The title speaks loudly, and the prologue shows us right away a big, big part of the plot. Which puzzled me at first as it seemed a little jumping the shark. Because right off we get a lot of important detail, which, by the way was done well at least through good character dialogue and interaction, yet for almost the next three hundred pages, the plot does that revolving door pattern I cannot stand. Around and around with the reader getting absolutely nowhere until bam – the end comes along and squeezed all the important parts into the last eighth of the book. It’s nothing new to save the most interesting parts for last, hopefully generating excitement that will entice readers to pick up the next book. There needs to be an interesting, layer-unfolding and well plotted series of events to tie it all together to that point though. I felt Fallen suffered from a giant sink hole of uninteresting points leading up to the final scenes.

I’m really not sure what this series first is trying to pull off. there is absolutely no sign of the balance I harp on with first books: characterization, plot, worldbuilding – some aspects are good, others interesting, some sorely neglected. We have a pretty good start, the first several chapters. These devolve though into that revolving door plot that seems to go nowhere though. What happens for more than two hundred pages seems to be meant to feel eerie, strange and therefore more intriguing, but I was bored. There is one shocking event – but then it is never mentioned again. This is an event that ought to have shaken the students and school to its core, as it hits so close to them and so close to Luce’s past, yet it is glossed over. The rest of the events meant to lead up to an exciting climax felt about as put together as an untucked shirt. I kept going, hoping for something exciting, something half past monotonous. No dice.

In short, the book was a disappointment. While I feel the author has potential – believe it or not, I enjoyed the voice used here immensely – I’m pretty sure I couldn’t muster the enthusiasm to continue. Because even though I can enjoy what might be trying to be accomplished with Fallen, the book unfortunately makes no sense. Nothing is concretely answered, there are no bones thrown out to the reader, only carrot after dangled carrot that are all yanked back. I suppose those that like to speculate on what might come to be could have a lot of fun with this one. There is that air of forbidden love, and we all know how hard that one can be to resist. Unfortunately for me, there are too many confusing scenarios here. There is no tangible incentive to continue on when we’re only given question upon question, answers nowhere in sight. I could make a lot of assumptions – but I’d rather know at least ONE thing about this whole mess for 100% sure. It would’ve made the whirlwind last eighth of the book more palatable.

Here there be Spoilers….do not read on if you do not wish to read spoilers. I’m continuing with them to articulate further why the book was promising yet a bit of a maze of secrets as well. My kingdom for a bread trail  to escape with or some incentive cheese to make the time worth it.

Even though the prologue reveals a big part of the book, I didn’t want to give it away to those not wanting any spoilers. The big reveal? Reincarnation, which is actually a pretty cool plot element. Luce and Daniel are reincarnated lovers that have met untold times in the past. Daniel, is also, of course, a fallen angel. I’ve always found fallen angels to be a fascinating part of Christian and other mythology and wondered when they’d make it into some genre fiction. Essentially, they are almost alien in thought, practice, etc. How can they make for good romantic heroes? How to make them sympathetic to us humans? When would this happen in the book? It really doesn’t, so the question is now when will this happen in the series.

Daniel is of course in the know, and has been the weilder of much more knowledge on the curse ever since its inception. Luce stumbles through the book, as ineffectual as they come. And this frustrated me. Instead of being a heroine that causes things to happen, that affects everything and everyone around her, everything merely happens to her. She’s in the dark the entire book – and still is at the end. She thinks to herself all the time that her attraction to Daniel and Cam makes no sense – yet she follows Daniel around like a puppy and she just melts the second he shows her the merest scrap of niceness or kindness. I know adolescence is awkward, I remember all to well it being so, but I winced one time too many at the awkwardness between Luce and Daniel.

There is, however, a good enough reason as to why Luce is kept in the dark practically the entire book, and that is that in their past lives, if Daniel ever told Luce of their shared history, “They” would come for her and once again Luce would be gone. The cycle would start again and in several years, Daniel, no matter how hard he tried to stay away, would eventually meet Luce again. And it happens over, and over…until now. Somethng has changed. From the “shadows” that dodge Luce’s steps, to the moments when Daniel does share the vaguest scrap of information – something is different. Could it be the big showdown? We don’t know. We don’t know why it’s all different. Carrot cleverly retracted.

We do know from this book that Daniel and Luce are being punished, cursed in a sense. We know Cam is in competition for her affections, a fact that enrages Daniel, finally at one point, to act as if he might care as the two “boys” engage in fisticuffs. We learn that Luce is the key to saving mankind in the ultimate battle against good and evil! This sounds really cool! But we know absolutely nothing about WHY. For any of it. Heaven forbid Daniel say anything else, Luce might be taken again and then there would be no sequel. But wait, she wasn’t taken away the moment she realized they knew eachother. Danger lurks though, nobody really knows anything here and to tell Luce anything more might make it ALL disappear again. So…we just keep on knowing nothing.

Luce of course gets on a plane like a good reincarnated lover so that she can be taken somewhere and kept safe. She does spare her parents some thought, who are worried about their troubled daughter, but again – Luce goes at Daniels behest, knowing really nothing at all about why this is all happening. There is a scene at the very end where Cam and Daniel both perch int he rafters about Luce as she sleeps, talking about her and who will ultimately have her…and it’s not a little creepy. It’s a lot creepy. It’s creepy because Luce just goes along with it all, based on that hunch from her past lives, and it’s creepy because she never questions the why of it all after Daniel finally comes out and somewhat tells her that basically he can’t tell her anything. But it will all be OK. Love, roses, beautiful angel wings, apparently these things cancel out the complete strangeness of the whole situation.

I don’t know that we can let this one go without comparing it to Twilight. Mysterious, supernatural boy, plain, awkward girl who is of course actually gorgeous and cannot for the life of her care about her safety. There’s a scene where Daniel saves her, a la the parking lot/van scene in Twilight. Two boys fighting over one girl. THE main boys being hot/cold/hot/cold. The constant nagging suspicions on both Luce and Bella’s parts, and no one in the know will admit a thing to them – except of course for the loyal friend that knows just enough gossip to make the heroine even more curious and crazed with having to know. It. ALL. We really needed a biology class partnership here, but thankfully, it was absent for once. Despite the lack of biology, it did feel like Twilight with angels at times.

End Spoilers

I predict this book will do well. I suspect that the problems I have with it will not be issues for a lot of readers. It’s a dark, broody, angsty soup of YA drama that tries to make good use of the new hotness – angels. It’s very possible the second book will carry this off better. This first feels very much like one never ending setup, so do prepare for a slow pace, with the real and important action only transitioning into the show at about the last eighth of the book. Forbidden love, mysterious young men and plenty of supernatural happenings usually make for exciting reads these days and I daresay a lot of readers will enjoy Fallen for these characteristics. Unfortunately, the way they were played out rang a little too hot mess for me.

Rating: One and a Half Scoops

Random House has hosted a special site for the Fallen series. Click here.