book review: Fallen

Fallen by Lauren Kate, a review

Note: The version of Fallen that I'd finished reading is the translated version, not the original English one.

Outline of the story: Luce is a young girl who's forced to enter Sword & Cross, a gothic, gloomy reform school for teenage deviants after her classmate/date was found dead under suspicious, unexplainable condition, leaving Luce more or less the prime suspect of the mysterious death. In Sword & Cross, Luce struggles to find her place among those less than friendly students. Life in a reform school is hard, what make it even harder are the shadows that keeps stalking Luce and putting the people around her in harm's way. Among students, Luce finds herself helplessly attracted to a moody, mysterious student called Daniel, who seems to be hiding something......

The cover of that book is breathtakingly beautiful, but don't let yourself be fooled. Sadly it's just yet another book which only one major good quality is its cover. Reading this book is like eating fast food, it's still eatable and you're unlikely to puke all over yourself after eating; but fast food is no good to your health and hell, this one doesn't even taste good.

Angels/fallen Angels and demons are very much of my interest, not to mention Kaori Yuki's Angel Sanctuary is one of my favorite mangas of all time. Out of the hope of having another good read about fallen angels I picked up this book, but half way through the book, I realize Fallen is as unfortunately as it can get to a reader, a Twilight rip-off. Simply put, replace 'vampires' with 'fallen angels'; replace 'Bella and Edward' with 'Luce and Daniel', you'll still get the same story. Even though I had to admit Miss Kate has more of an imagination than S.Meyer, the reform-school setting of the story, the mystery surrounding the death of Luce's previous love interest have potentials; still the writing is no good; the main characters are hardly anything more than plain cardboard cutout. Plus the author left way too many things unexplained to the very end, leaving too big of a 'Wait for the next book!' sign on the last page of the story, it's a complete turn-off.

Plus what I'd found really ridiculous is the fact that I'd learned more about the setting of fallen angels, the heavenly war between good and evil and the reasons why those angels had fallen and what's going on between Luce and Daniel (that she's cursed to love him) by reading the introduction on the backcover than reading the entire book itself.

The 'love' between the main characters is also a problem, Daniel basically acted like a jerk toward Luce, alright the guy is a textbook example of Edward Cullen's school of stalker/abusive boyfriend for crying out loud; but Luce still kept pinning after him for no good reason. Oh hell, so a jerk is still a desirable boyfriend as long as he's drop-dead handsome and has a perfect body? That's totally messed up. I'd thought that such bullshit would only happen in badly written Japanese girl's mangas, but the YA novels from the'post-Twilight era' keep proofing me wrong.

And there's also another problem with Daniel and the other fallen angels, just......WHAT THE HELL IS AN IMMORTAL DOING IN HIGHSCHOOL ANYWAY? Highschool is no fun so why must they ever go there? That's just ridiculous.

Suggestion: the same like Twilight, you shouldn't give yourself any excuse to buy this book, especially not for the beautiful cover! It'll be a total waste of good money and paper. Borrow it if you have a lot, I mean a lot of time to kill. That's it.