Angelology by Danielle Trussoni

So I saw that this book was hanging out on the New York Times Bestseller list a couple of weeks ago and my curiosity was stirred. I hadn’t even seen it come across the counter at work. So I had to check it out and see what it was all about.

At first, it is slow going and it took me some time to get into this story. It starts out with two apparently divergent storylines (although we always know that they will converge eventually, don’t we?) Sister Evangeline is going about her day at the St. Rose convent in Upstate New York (including her daily “job” of working in the convent’s library… cool!) and discovers a request for access to information from a scholar in New York City related to Abigail Rockefeller’s communications with the late abbess of the convent. Despite the convent’s usual policy of politely refusing requests for access, something about this request leads Sister Evangeline to go searching into the archives. I wasn’t convinced by Sister Evangeline’s motivation to follow this request, but of course there wouldn’t be a story if she hadn’t!

The second storyline turns out to be about the very same young scholar that had sent the fascinating letter to the convent, who seems to only be known by his last name: Verlaine. (Ok, they might mention his first name once or twice, but without the book in front of me, I can’t remember for the life of me what it might have been) Verlaine is working for a creepy guy named Percival Gregori who is apparently quite infirm… and did I mention creepy? So we follow Percival home and we come to discover that he isn’t completely human at all! He lives with his mother (even creepier!) in a luxurious 5^th Avenue penthouse, and they all have wings! Percival has apparently contracted some sort of winged-creature disease, though, and his wings have shriveled to blackened stumps and he has trouble breathing. (Seems to me he deserves it… and too bad the disease doesn’t seem to be contagious. His mom is a piece of work, too!)

Anyway, all of this leads to the revelation that these part angel/part human creatures, called Nephilim, live in the world. They are descended from the original fallen angels who broke the rules and mated with human women way back when.  And they are evil. Pretty, but evil. Makes you think that the author might have a thing against tall, blonde-haired, blue-eyed folks. They all live a super long time, are quite rich and very snobby. And they are apparently behind all of the bad stuff that has happened in the world. That would figure, huh? It’s always the rich, pretty people!

Ok, so without giving away much more of the plot, the good guys are the Angelologists and the bad guys are the Nephilim and they are both searching for a particular treasure that was recovered on an expedition back in the 1940’s but then secreted away. All of life as we know it hangs in the balance with this treasure. Wow!

I started getting more interested in the book after the first third or so. The story is definitely engaging. There is really a lot going on in this book, but not so much that you have to keep going back and forth saying “Wait, who’s that? What are they talking about?” The writer’s style is clunky at times… the dialog is beautiful, but some of the connecting prose is a big awkward. I found myself wondering “who would think something like that?”

Comparisons to Dan Brown’s novels and Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian are unavoidable. I think the story is more artfully formed than Dan Brown’s novels although the plot twists are more subtle in this book. I saw a couple of things coming quite a bit beforehand here… Brown is able to surprise me more effectively. There is some good action, bringing to mind that the book might make a nice Hollywood film.  Trussoni’s writing doesn’t match the beautiful flow of Kostova’s, but the story kept me almost as engrossed as The Historian did. The descriptive passages in this novel are quite beautiful and created a vivid mental picture of the places and people in the story.

The ending of this book was a bit of a disappointment to me… mostly because it was abrupt. It seems to me that the author already has plans for a sequel… the story just seems to be too unfinished. If she doesn’t write a sequel, I will be very disappointed, because I would enjoy reading more about this story and these characters.