AngelFall by Susan Ee

I received this book free through Goodreads First Reads. This has no impact on my thoughts or feelings for this book.

Goodreads Summary:

It's been six weeks since angels of the apocalypse descended to demolish the modern world. Street gangs rule the day while fear and superstition rule the night. When warrior angels fly away with a helpless little girl, her seventeen-year-old sister Penryn will do anything to get her back.

Anything, including making a deal with an enemy angel.

Raffe is a warrior who lies broken and wingless on the street. After eons of fighting his own battles, he finds himself being rescued from a desperate situation by a half-starved teenage girl.

Traveling through a dark and twisted Northern California, they have only each other to rely on for survival. Together, they journey toward the angels' stronghold in San Francisco where she'll risk everything to rescue her sister and he'll put himself at the mercy of his greatest enemies for the chance to be made whole again.

My Thoughts:

I admit I received this book a while ago. I read the first chapter or two and then put it down. I wasn't in the mood for what I thought would be yet another run of the mill post apocalyptic teen girl hero story. Which this book does have some of that, but it has some other elements which made it stand out for me once I gave it a real chance. I read this book in its entirety in one day. Part of that is it is a really fast read, the other part is my curiosity of where this story would go.

Penryn is the stereotypical I didn't choose this I just want to be normal hero of the story. What I like about her is her faults. For instance he accidentally throws a rock at the person trying to help her. She just had bad aim. Which if this book were real I suspect things like that would happen more often, as real people don't always hit their mark.

Raffe is the totally hot totally broody angel who lost his wings. I don't hold that against him too much. He isn't an overbearing douche trying to control Penryn which is often the case in these books. I like that he bets on her and leaves her to fight her own fights.

Penryn's family is of course a broken family. Mom is craycray and little sister is in a wheelchair. The mental illness of Mom is interesting in that in a lot of ways the craycray are better equipped to handle life with angels trying to kill you. Her insanity if finally a strength rather than a weakness. Now little sister gave me nightmares after what happened to her. She is part of the book that totally creeped me out and I wasn't expecting the hair on the back of my neck to get the wiggins. I won't go into too much detail but mad doctors are doing things to angels and humans alike which is bad news bears. I don't read many books that could be considered scary sauce so I am probably extra sensitive to creepy concepts. I don't watch horror movies either and this would fit right in with a horror movie.

So overall, I would recommend this book to fans of the genre and maybe horror fans but note that the creepy stuff is much later in the book and I am a wuss. I would say that it was a fast and entertaining read, so if you want something that meets that criteria I would recommend this one. 

While writing this review I was listening to Giles sing from the Buffy musical episode.

Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own by by Kate Bolick

***I received this book free from the publisher in exchange for a review, however, this has not swayed my opinion in anyway***

Goodreads Summary:

“Whom to marry, and when will it happen—these two questions define every woman’s existence.” So begins Spinster, a revelatory and slyly erudite look at the pleasures and possibilities of remaining single. Using her own experiences as a starting point, journalist and cultural critic Kate Bolick invites us into her carefully considered, passionately lived life, weaving together the past and present to examine why­ she—along with over 100 million American women, whose ranks keep growing—remains unmarried.

This unprecedented demographic shift, Bolick explains, is the logical outcome of hundreds of years of change that has neither been fully understood, nor appreciated. Spinster introduces a cast of pioneering women from the last century whose genius, tenacity, and flair for drama have emboldened Bolick to fashion her life on her own terms: columnist Neith Boyce, essayist Maeve Brennan, social visionary Charlotte Perkins Gilman, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, and novelist Edith Wharton. By animating their unconventional ideas and choices, Bolick shows us that contemporary debates about settling down, and having it all, are timeless—the crucible upon which all thoughtful women have tried for centuries to forge a good life.

Intellectually substantial and deeply personal, Spinster is both an unreservedly inquisitive memoir and a broader cultural exploration that asks us to acknowledge the opportunities within ourselves to live authentically. Bolick offers us a way back into our own lives—a chance to see those splendid years when we were young and unencumbered, or middle-aged and finally left to our own devices, for what they really are: unbounded and our own to savor.

My Thoughts:

I want to start off with saying that whom to marry and when it will happen have never defined my existence. I could relate to some of Spinster, but not all. I am not sure I bought the the sweeping generalizations made based off of a hand full of individual women most of whom are dead and therefore can't clarify or explain their positions. This being said, I liked Spinster if for no other reason that it got me thinking about things I may never have thought about otherwise.

Often, I think women my age and older think that we all have the same experiences when it comes to marriage and commitment and then it is those freaks among us who dare to go against the norm. I am not sure this is the case. I do think that women have often been silenced, as pointed out either intentionally or implied in this book. I do think that silence has been misunderstood. In reading this book I examined my own thoughts about marriage and what it means to women as a whole as well as me specifically.

Personally, I never wanted to get married. I found a partner I love and I want to share my life with but marriage wasn't ever something I needed or wanted. Things worked out the way they did because I, just like many of the women in the book, am a pragmatist. Getting married gave me health insurance (in a time before Obamacare), tuition reduction at my University (where my husband works), and rights which are not granted to single people. I wanted my husband, who knows me best, making the hard choices for me if things ever came to that. Many women get married for pragmatic reasons, and many more get married for romantic reasons. In reading Spinster I felt a little judged by the author, but I don't think that was her intent. I think it is hard to write about something so big and yet so personal without offending someone.

I really enjoyed the exploration of single womanhood through the words and lives of female writers. I don't know if Kate Bolick exactly expressed what those writers thought or felt, but ultimately that wasn't the point of her book. Kate was on a journey herself and took the words of others as inspiration. I don't think writers should expect to be fully understood and this book is a perfect example of that. A good book isn't defined by agreement with the author, but perhaps how much the author gets us thinking. We writers never know if someone will fully get our meaning, personally, I love when someone finds something of themselves in my writing.

I thought a lot about this book as I was reading it. I thought a lot about it for weeks after I finished reading it. I re-read several sections before finally sitting down to finish this review. Overall, I would recommend this book to anyone looking for an interesting take on a subject that isn't talked about enough or even fully explored. I don't know that her views are universal, they weren't for me, but I think perhaps they may hit home for a lot of women. Examination of society and why we do what we do is always worthwhile.

I want to point out I received this book from Blogging for Books for this review.

While writing this review I was listening to my upstairs neighbor move out and clean her apartment and a 90's mix on google radio.