A review by cocacolor
Angels & Demons by Dan Brown

adventurous medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.0

The breadth and depth of architectural and physical detail is good but the science is iffy, which normally wouldn't be much of a downside except that the author clearly went to a lot of effort to make it as accurate as possible--I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume it might've seemed more accurate twenty years ago. I'd say the twists were pretty predictable, except that somehow, even though I suspected
the camerlengo ever since Chartrand mentioned the walk they'd taken together, Janus's true identity still caught me off guard because the author had spent the last hundreds or so pages advancing the Kohler-is-Janus theory
, so kudos for that. Vittoria is, unexpectedly, a better developed and more capable character than Langdon, so ally points for that--and then a whole slew of them taken off because the Hassassin and Kohler are, respectively, absolutely skin-crawling racist, Islamaphobic, and ableist stereotypes. On a pure narrative level, it's mediocre; in its representation, worse than mediocre. Also, more malapropisms than a Bush speech. There have to be better "solve-conspiracy-puzzle" thrillers out there. 
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