Reviews with content warning for War - Angelfall

due to how overhyped this book is i was genuinely hoping i would like it, but instead i hated it and felt like it was such a waste of my time. here is a well thought out and organized list of complaints:

1. schizophrenia was not at all well represented in this book. schizophrenia is made to seem like something that’s both unpredictable and dangerous, which is far from the case, and there’s multiple times where penryn calls her mother “crazy” and “insane” due to her schizophrenia. the author could’ve done a much better job at doing some research on the condition but instead chose not to and did such a disservice to those with schizophrenia, which is just so unacceptable
2. penryn is completely antagonistic towards her mother despite the fact that we as the reader have been given little to no reason or evidence for penryn’s mom being a bad person. to me it just seems like she just hates her mom due to her mental illness which is bizarre to me. it would’ve made much more sense for the author to add small flashbacks to times when her mother was a bad mom towards her and her sister paige, ie some flashback of her mom abusing them or something, but any information as to how her mom might’ve been before the angels invaded is incredibly vague and not at helpful for understanding penryn’s difficult relationship with her mom.
3. the overall concept is incredibly cool but done so poorly. there’s no clear motive as to why the angels invaded earth and caused all this mass destruction, and if there WAS some sort of motive behind it all it was not explained well enough
4. both penryn and raffe were annoying asf throughout this whole book and it made me wanna rip my hair out. small spoiler >

the fact that in the entire book raffe is just so incredibly rude and mean to penryn and then towards the end when he thinks she’s dead, he FINALLY decides to act all nice and acts like he cared about her all along??? ludicrous i tell you, ludicrous. just a pure example of how men ain’t shit, ESPECIALLY if it’s men from some crappy ya dystopian novel.

also penryn kind of has this “i’m not like other girls” kind of attitude which is so annoying, like every other woman is just a slut but she’s the only one who’s normal…..mk.
5. the writing at times was atrocious. there were often times some grammatical errors or sentences that made no sense, or even sentences that were repeated multiple times, almost as if the writer was trying to fill a word count or something. i should not be seeing grammatical errors and weird sentences in a published piece of work, PERIOD.

TLDR: the only good thing about this book is that it’s fairly fast paced and if you either aren’t a busy student or a grown adult working a full time job, you can probably complete this in about a day or two. otherwise, the characters are either not written well or just plain annoying, the concept was executed quite poorly, and the writing was just ridiculous at times. just in general a waste of my time

Content Warnings

emmerylynn's review against another edition

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adventurous dark tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.25

The fast-paced plot made me keep going. Overall, I didn’t like the characters or how the story went down. Protagonist was annoying; the narrative voice was juvenile. The conflict among the angel politics wasn’t explained well and the monsters made no sense. Idk…I cringed a lot

Content Warnings

psliz's review against another edition

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adventurous tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

1.0

so beyond ableist i couldn't finish (DNF'd at page 71). but it gave me the opportunity to finally give myself permission to dnf books and the opportunity to get educated on ableist terms/phrases

Content Warnings