I actually did a Great Book Purge last week, culling nearly 200 books from my shelves (and floor spaces, and under bed spaces, etc.). Right now the majority of the said cull-ees are still in my living room downstairs, waiting for me to get them to either my library or Goodwill. I invited some friends over on Monday to take what they wanted and I still have around 125 books left. It's all good...I can now walk beside my bed without danger of knocking Mt. TBR over with books I've since lost interest in or will never read again. I'm so PROUD of getting some of these books out of my house (okay...they'll all be out eventually, I swear). I even have a small pile by my bed of books that will be Up Next. Wow...not having to search for books because I've stashed them all over is liberating! And K and I also Drove By Barnes and Noble the other day while out shopping...it was hard but we did it! Go, Us!
Anyway, the first book I've finished that I can share the review here is Rapture by Lauren Kate. I just published my review on Amazon...it took a while to take off but it's such a fine ending to the series that my review is glowing, I tell you. So without further ado...here 'tis.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I must admit that in the first 100 or so pages of Rapture, the long awaited finale to Lauren Kate's fabulous Fallen series, I was becoming discouraged. Was I really going on a quest to find three unknown objects that would avert the Fall of the angels from Heaven? A quest, really? And there seemed to be an awful lot of flying through the air with its myriad descriptions of what Luce was seeing and feeling but not really moving the story along much. But then Kate brings us to the action of actually finding the sought -after artifacts and what must be done with them and things began to pick up, and once Luce is led to her major discovery, I was all in (despite my eye rolling at the "battle" between Dee and her sister--the cheesiest lines of the entire series, I swear).
Of course this book is the final tale of the great love affair of mortal Luce and angel Daniel, under a curse to find and then lose one another over lifetime after lifetime. Now that Lucifer is involved, he's determined to re-create the great Fall of the angels from Heaven, and Luce, Daniel, and their band of angel/demon friends have to nine days in which to avert the disaster. While I may not have been enamored of the initial build-up (some of which felt like filler material, there simply to stretch the story out with minute descriptions of rocks and other natural features), I can say, hands down, that the final third of this book is wonderful! While I don't subscribe to Kate's vision of religion, I do have to say it's beautiful, well written, and a very fitting way to end the series. In fact, the final chapters of this book are so well done, filled with so much heart and intensity, I was simply blown away. So often book series merely come to a sputtering halt but this book brings another level of engagement to the story. Absolutely a perfect ending, with even a bit of room for new stories to be told. I hope Ms. Kate will supply us with more of her gifted imagination with the characters we've grown to know and love.
~taminator40
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