Book Review: Strange Angels

Strange Angels by Lili St. Crow

Despite it’s somewhat misleading title, Strange Angels has no angels, in it, well, not officially. It does, however, have werewolves, zombies, vampires, and a host of other paranormal oddities. The book is about a girl, Dru Anderson, who is something like that kid off of the Sixth Sense, only instead of ghosts following her around, she has one freakish werewolf and a vampire. Unless you’ve been asleep the past few months, you’ve noticed the recent swarm of paranormal romance books, mostly due to the very popular Twilight series. In my opinion, both books have a lot in common: whiney accident prone female, check. Two hot mortal enemies fighting for said female’s affection, check. A very poorly written book, check. The author goes from trying to make the main character a tough/sarcastic/takes-no-crap girl, to a lost little girl just looking for a friend in the world. Unfortunately, this attempt only succeeds in making the chick extremely annoying , leaving me wishing she would just make up her mind already.

As in Twilight, she has an overly protective werewolf at her side, Graves, who is pretty much useless. He’s not even funny, though the author tries very hard to achieve this. Albiet he tries his hardest, in my opinion, he’s nothing more than a piece of dead weight that the girl should have ditched sometime immediately after the first 100 pages, i.d. right after he was bitten by a werewolf. Now, I haven’t been hunting monsters for most of my life, and I haven’t got some freaky and uncontrollable sixth sense to depend on like Dru, but I think that once a guy has been turned into something that could potentially kill you, it’s a good idea to get as far away from that thing as possible. But, then, that just might be my sense of self preservation talking. What do I know?

The third main character, and perhaps the one who the majority of females will find the most intriguing, is the vampire Christophe. Amazingly enough, I’ve decided to skip over this character’s flaws and yes, sorry, but there are quite a few. Instead, I am going to point out his scary perfection…ice cold baby blues, a wicked smile…like he’s some kind of angel with a bad streak.1 However, he’s too blatantly perfect way too soon in the book. Though, in truth, I don’t really think that 160+ pages are as much ‘too soon into the book’ as they are ‘way too many pages for nothing to have happened by now’. Basically my point is that he’s utterly predictable, like a typical teenage girl’s dream wrapped up in an amazing package. Though I think his character introduction was badly concocted, he is a perfect motivation to continue reading the book. In the end, gorgeous guy or no, it turned out to be more of a mistake than anything else.

Basically, this book is extremely run-of-the-mill. I found it boring and repetitive. It has nothing that makes it stand out from all the other teen vampire/werewolf romance novels out there. Like all other books, it had the potential to be something that was somewhat enjoyable, but this one in my humble opinion, seems to have failed miserably. The author seems to be suffering from schizophrenia, as all of her characters, and even the plot appears as if she herself hasn’t figured where she wants any of this to go. Not only is it confusing, but even after I’ve read the book for the second time, I’m not exactly sure how any of the events during the first 200 or so pages mattered All in all, I give this book a two out of vie. One point because the guy is hot, and I think that should be appreciated, and another…because I kinda feel sorry for the author. I didn’t really mean to bash your book, it just kinda happened. It’s nothing personal, but…well…go ahead and call me a cynic, you won’t have been the first.

1 He’s the dangerously powerful bad boy, yet he lets a little girl and a newly turned wulfen beat the crap out of him. He gives orders but takes none; yet ask how high as soon as he thinks Dru wants him to jump…Well, I wasn’t going to point out his flaws; but I just couldn’t seem to help myself.

--The Marvelous Niah