Scan barcode
A review by claudiearseneault
Good Angel by A.M. Blaushild
3.0
This is one of the most difficult review I’ve had to write in... quite a while. Maybe ever. I went into GOOD ANGEL knowing I had in my hands an indie novel with more than one asexual and aromantic character, from an author who was on both spectrum, and I knew it dealt explicitly with exploration and questioning through the story. Two author friends had enjoyed it. I was more than ready to fall in love.
And at first I did. Iofiel is sweet and naive and only really wants to help everyone, and Archie the poor imp is exactly my kind of character (I love Archie to pieces). Their meeting is fun, and the story takes off in fun and often unexpected ways. Between Santiago and Damien and Maalik, the surrounding cast of characters is intriguing, and I was looking forward to see their friendship evolve. Then the plot happened, and the things I loved about this story started falling by the wayside, and the things I was wary of took more and more room.
A lot of this rating isn’t so much faults in the book itself, as the fact it wasn’t for me. This is intensely personal, but I don’t deal well with determinism (your fate is decided ahead), even less so when it is combined with inherent goodness and evil. And while GOOD ANGEL started playing with these lines and blurring them early on, it quickly falls back on them as Absolute Sides. I found the way this interacted with relationships between characters to be irritating at best, and infuriating on a regular basis. I had found myself wondering if this nice group of people were more than friends of circumstances, and the second half of the novel felt like a huge confirmation of this.An excellent example of this is that when Iofiel finally reveals to her demon friends that the End (as in, the apocalypse) is coming and she has a role to play in it, no one is willing to try to find a third way. Nope. Everyone reverts to “welp. We’re angels and demons so we’re enemies and whatever we have had for the last few months doesn’t mean enough to fight for it”.
There are a few other things that manage to knock this down for me--the huge mood whiplash around 75 %, along with this book committing one of my biggest writing sin (haha): narrator withholding information from the reader for a "twist" or a "surprise". That last, combined with how I already struggled with the second part, really knocked the rating down to 3 instead of 4.
And now I feel like I've only really talked about what didn't work. I mainly picked up GOOD ANGEL for the asexual and aromantic rep, however, and in that regards it does wonderful and unique things. It's not perfect (I have a lot of thoughts I want to put in a blog post), but it contains several characters that regularly discuss their (a)sexuality, question the nature of attraction (romantic and sexual both), and try out things. I did expect a little ... more ... introspection, I think? But Iofiel is quite clearly still questioning where she falls on both aro and ace spectrum. And it's also quite a different experience to evolve in a world where aceness and aroness are assumed as defaults.
In short, I wish GOOD ANGEL had stayed to the kind of storylines the first half of the book was giving me, with its lightheartedness and slow blurring of lines and building of friendships. The main problem with this book is that it promises one type of story--one at which it excels--and then it delivers another (one at which it's ok). But it's a good story, and if you're craving ace rep, this is an unique example, and I definitely recommend checking it out.
And at first I did. Iofiel is sweet and naive and only really wants to help everyone, and Archie the poor imp is exactly my kind of character (I love Archie to pieces). Their meeting is fun, and the story takes off in fun and often unexpected ways. Between Santiago and Damien and Maalik, the surrounding cast of characters is intriguing, and I was looking forward to see their friendship evolve. Then the plot happened, and the things I loved about this story started falling by the wayside, and the things I was wary of took more and more room.
A lot of this rating isn’t so much faults in the book itself, as the fact it wasn’t for me. This is intensely personal, but I don’t deal well with determinism (your fate is decided ahead), even less so when it is combined with inherent goodness and evil. And while GOOD ANGEL started playing with these lines and blurring them early on, it quickly falls back on them as Absolute Sides. I found the way this interacted with relationships between characters to be irritating at best, and infuriating on a regular basis. I had found myself wondering if this nice group of people were more than friends of circumstances, and the second half of the novel felt like a huge confirmation of this.
There are a few other things that manage to knock this down for me--the huge mood whiplash around 75 %, along with this book committing one of my biggest writing sin (haha): narrator withholding information from the reader for a "twist" or a "surprise". That last, combined with how I already struggled with the second part, really knocked the rating down to 3 instead of 4.
And now I feel like I've only really talked about what didn't work. I mainly picked up GOOD ANGEL for the asexual and aromantic rep, however, and in that regards it does wonderful and unique things. It's not perfect (I have a lot of thoughts I want to put in a blog post), but it contains several characters that regularly discuss their (a)sexuality, question the nature of attraction (romantic and sexual both), and try out things. I did expect a little ... more ... introspection, I think? But Iofiel is quite clearly still questioning where she falls on both aro and ace spectrum. And it's also quite a different experience to evolve in a world where aceness and aroness are assumed as defaults.
In short, I wish GOOD ANGEL had stayed to the kind of storylines the first half of the book was giving me, with its lightheartedness and slow blurring of lines and building of friendships. The main problem with this book is that it promises one type of story--one at which it excels--and then it delivers another (one at which it's ok). But it's a good story, and if you're craving ace rep, this is an unique example, and I definitely recommend checking it out.