Angelfire (Angelfire #1) by Courtney Allison Moulton

Angelfire (Angelfire #1)

by Courtney Allison Moulton

Synopsis (courtesy of Goodreads):

This debut, the first novel in a trilogy, is achingly romantic, terrifying, and filled with blistering action.

When seventeen-year-old Ellie starts seeing reapers - monstrous creatures who devour humans and send their souls to Hell - she finds herself on the front lines of a supernatural war between archangels and the Fallen and faced with the possible destruction of her soul.

A mysterious boy named Will reveals she is the reincarnation of an ancient warrior, the only one capable of wielding swords of angelfire to fight the reapers, and he is an immortal sworn to protect her in battle. Now that Ellie's powers have been awakened, a powerful reaper called Bastian has come forward to challenge her. He has employed a fierce assassin to eliminate her - an assassin who has already killed her once.

While balancing her dwindling social life and reaper-hunting duties, she and Will discover Bastian is searching for a dormant creature believed to be a true soul reaper. Bastian plans to use this weapon to ignite the End of Days and to destroy Ellie's soul, ending her rebirth cycle forever. Now, she must face an army of Bastian's most frightening reapers, prevent the soul reaper from consuming her soul, and uncover the secrets of her past lives - including truths that may be too frightening to remember.

Review:

I thought Ellie's character was fantastic in this book. So spunky and stubborn - just the way I like my heroines :) I also liked Will a lot, though I think I would have liked a better, more detailed description of him since I couldn't always picture him in my mind as I read. It would also be really cool if Ms. Moulton included in the next book a sketch of the tattoo will has on his shoulder/back. 

So - angelfire is the title, so yes, there are angels involved. I read this book right after reading Unearthly, so it was interesting to see how Ms. Moulton twisted and created her paranormal angel story from what I will call "the starting material": archangels, fallen angels, demons, nephilim, the coming of the second war brought on by Lucifer against God -- I think you catch my drift. I liked the premise of reapers, and the offspring of the good fallen angels vs the offspring of the bad fallen angels (who've aligned themselves with Lucifer and killing humans to doom those souls to Hell). 

(Side note: I love reapers in the story especially since I am a HUGE fan of Dead Like Me (old TV show about reapers and their not-so-glamorous, but hilarious everyday lives)).

The way Ellie's school and her friends, and friends' cars, are described evoke frighteningly identical high school memories I have. Yeah, it was sadly one of those schools where you could tell the student parking lot and teacher parking lot apart by the grand number of ritzy cars in the student lot. >_< No worries, I was not among those kind of people. 

The book I have to be honest was hard to get into at first, with the storyline kind of dragging until the weird mishaps Ellie has and Will's appearance. And while I liked that Ms. Moulton put some of Ellie's previous lives' memories throughout the book, I felt that it staggered the story and did not really unravel all that much past knowledge and experience to Ellie quickly. 

Loved the action - swords with fire that can kill anything evil? Heck YES! And there is plenty of it throughout the book, and was pleased with the amount of action and kind of action in the story.

Being a YA novel, the romance was very PG so *shrug* that did not do much for me. I do think Ellie and Will as a couple is cute, but now that it's become this forbidden thing (reminding me a lot of Ever/Damen romance from Alyson Noel's Evermore series), I feel that in the coming sequels there will be all this long, drawn out drama over them still loving each other, but they can't give into because the archangels (and God probably) forbid it. *sigh*

Rating: 3 / 5 Stars