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Title | Fallen
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Author | Laren Kate
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Cover Art | Fernanda Brussi Goncalves
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Publisher | Delacorte Press - 2009
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First Printing | Delacorte Press - 2009
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Title | Torment
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Author | Laren Kate
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Cover Art | Fernanda Brussi Goncalves
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Publisher | Delacorte Press - 2010
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First Printing | Delacorte Press - 2010
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Title | Passion
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Author | Laren Kate
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Cover Art | Fernanda Brussi Goncalves
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Publisher | Delacorte Press - 2011
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First Printing | Delacorte Press - 2011
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Title | Fallen in Love
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Author | Laren Kate
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Cover Art | Fernanda Brussi Goncalves
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Publisher | Delacorte Press - 2012
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First Printing | Delacorte Press - 2012
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Title | Rapture
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Author | Laren Kate
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Cover Art | Fernanda Brussi Goncalves
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Publisher | Ember Editions - 2016
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First Printing | 2012
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Title | Unforgiven
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Author | Laren Kate
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Cover Art | Carrie Schechter
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Publisher | Tinderbox Books - 2015
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First Printing | Delacorte Press - 2015
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Category | Young Adult
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Warnings | None
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Main Characters | Lucinda Price, Daniel, Cam, Arriane, Pennyweather, Roland, Gabbe, Molly, Shelby, Miles
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Main Elements | Angels
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Website | ---
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 Fallen
There’s something achingly familiar about Daniel Grigori.
Mysterious and aloof, he captures Luce Price’s attention from the moment she sees him on her first day at the Sword & Cross boarding school in sultry Savannah, Georgia. He’s the one bright spot in a place where cell phones are forbidden, the other students are all screw-ups, and security cameras watch every move.
Even though Daniel wants nothing to do with Luce—and goes out of his way to make that very clear—she can’t let it go. Drawn to him like a moth to a flame, she has to find out what Daniel is so desperate to keep secret… even if it kills her
Torment
Hell on earth.
That's what it's like for Luce to be apart from her fallen angel boyfriend, Daniel.
It took them an eternity to find one another, but not he has told her he must go away. Just long enough to hunt down the Outcasts - immortals who want to kill Luce. Daniel hide Luce at Shoreline, a school on the rocky California coast with unusually gifted students: Nephilim, the offspring of fallen angels and humans.
At Shoreline, Luce learns what the Shadows are, and how she can use them as windows to her previous lives. Yet the more Luce learns, the more she suspects that Daniel hasn’t told her everything. He’s hiding something—something dangerous.
What if Daniel’s version of the past isn’t actually true? What if Luce is really meant to be with someone else?
Passion
And she has. Over and over again. Throughout time, Luce and Daniel have found each other, only to be painfully torn apart: Luce dead, Daniel left broken and alone. But perhaps it doesn’t need to be that way… .
Luce is certain that something—or someone—in a past life can help her in her present one. So she begins the most important journey of this lifetime… going back eternities to witness firsthand her romances with Daniel… and finally unlock the key to making their love last.
Cam and the legions of angels and Outcasts are desperate to catch Luce, but none are as frantic as Daniel. He chases Luce through their shared pasts, terrified of what might happen if she rewrites history.
Because their romance for the ages could go up in flames… forever.
Fallen in Love
And in a twist of fate, four extraordinary love stories intersect over the course of a romantic Valentine’s Day in medieval England. Miles and Shelby find love where they least expect it. Roland learns a painful lesson about finding and losing love. Arriane pays the price for a love so fierce it burns. And for the first—and last—time, Daniel and Luce spend a night together like none other.
Rapture
When evil triumphs… when the world ends… trust your love.
The sky is dark with wings…
Like sand in an hourglass, time is running out for Luce and Daniel. To stop Lucifer from erasing the past, they must find the place where the angels fell to earth. Dark forces are after them, and Daniel doesn’t know if he can do this—live only to lose Luce again and again. Yet together they will face an epic battle that will end with lifeless bodies… and angel dust. Great sacrifices are made. Hearts are destroyed. And suddenly Luce knows what must happen. For she was meant to be with someone other than Daniel. The curse they’ve borne has always and only been about her—and the love she cast aside. The choice she makes now will be the only one that truly matters. In the fight for Luce, who will win? The astonishing conclusion to the Fallen series. Heaven can’t wait any longer.
Unforgiven
It’s the book FALLEN fans have been waiting for: Cam’s story, the brooding, bad-boy dark angel readers love.
High school can be hell.
Cam knows what it’s like to be haunted. He’s spent more time in Hell than any angel ever should. And his freshest Hell is high school, where Lilith, the girl he can’t stop loving, is serving out a punishment for his crimes.
Cam made a bet with Lucifer: he has fifteen days to convince the only girl who really matters to him to love him again. If he succeeds, Lilith will be allowed back into the world, and they can live their lives together. But if he fails…there’s a special place in Hell just for him.
Tick-tock.
Spread your wings and cry as bad boy dark angel Cam finally reveals his anguished heart in the epic new FALLEN novel, UNFORGIVEN.
I picked this up when they first started coming out, before I realized that while the concept of vampires, fallen angels, etc in YA literature sounded exciting with a lot of promise for great plots, that many of those books turned out to be nothing but young girls sitting on their beds complaining to the world that they aren't good enough for the guy that loves them. Oh, and of course there would be two guys, one that's nice and good and would take care of her, the other would be wild and dark and mysterious, and she would go with the dark one. 'Cause "dangerous" and "broken & brooding" make for good mates.
Anyway, after reading a few reviews I found that this would be one of those series. No real plot or worldbuilding, no character growth, just a whole lot of young adult angst and insecurities. But I already owned all but one book in the series, and I hate getting rid of books I haven't read.
So I started in with the bar so low it was flush with the floor. But in fact, I didn't instantly hate it. I'm also not going to love it, but it had something to it that made me actually want to keep going, a mystery that needs to be solved (a short way through the third book I'm pretty sure what it will be but I could be wrong).
It took them an eternity to find one another, so melodramatic...it's only seventeen years...and even the covers, while spookily gothic, don't match the vibe of the books, at all. It was like they were done for a totally different series.
There was however quite a bit I didn't like. The first book took quite a while for anything to start happening but it ends with a bit of a bang. Luce wasn't as soppy and whimpery as I feared she would be, not that I would want to be her friend either. But then there's Daniel, he should be cool right? A fallen angel who has been in love with Lucinda lifetime after lifetime, but for some unknown twist in the curse, he can't tell her....well he can't tell her a darn thing. Which means Kate can't tell the reader either. And there is nothing more annoying than having a protagonist bumbling about and getting into trouble because she is totally clueless about what is going on. To be fair, I think I'd be as frustrated as her. "Don't leave the school" is pretty clear, but when you're friends are going on a boat trip, you might want to have some idea why you can't leave the school. Otherwise your boyfriend comes off rather controlling and random, putting down rules to do nothing other than to ensure you're a well behaved girlfriend. On the other hand Luce already knows about the angel war going on and being told it's dangerous out there should be a no-brainer, so she shouldn't wander of...you know, a dozen times. Once, maybe, especially as she almost dies. But then she does it again, and again...not the brightest bulb.
And then the third book...ok, time travel through the Announcers is kind of cool, but felt more like some weird handwaving construct to allow the time travel, kind of like in Star Trek when they pull out some technobabble out of their asses to explain some phenomenon. The Announcers didn't feel real to me. And the third book is just Luce reliving life after life after life after live...and then Daniel getting a few chapters to do the same, at each iteration maybe getting a micron closer to the answer...but just a micron. It's like a soap opera, you could stop watching for a week, jump back in, and so little forward progress would have taken place you didn't miss anything. Sure, seeing the world in all the different time periods is kind of interesting, except you see so little of the periods, Luce just goes straight to either herself or Daniel, which is of course the point of all the time travelling, but it gets repetitive.
I still have another three books to go (I believe it was intended to be a trilogy to start...I guess when you really drag things out you get your audience to buy more books, I'll probaby borrow the last one from the library), and I'll keep reading since I want to understand more about how the angel society is setup up. There are not just the Fallen on the side of God and those on the side of Lucifer, but there are blind angels that are Outcasts, and some that are called Scales, but they are all barely touched and I can't figure out how they fit into the grand scheme of things. So that is what keeps me going, not the near gag-worthy eternal love between Luce and Daniel (which of course Luce couldn't even trust, being a YA protagonist and need "proof" that he really loved her).
And Shoreline was cool, a Hogwarts for Nephilim, I could have spent more time there!
Update
Fallen in Love could have been skipped, it gave some background to some of the characters that we wouldn't otherwise have had but I felt didn't add anything to the overall storyline...and what's the chance that everyone ended up having some serious romantic event occur all at the same time?
Rapture actually wraps up the series, we find out the big secret that no one could tell Lucinda (something I figured out in the third book and suspected earlier though obviously I didn't have all the details). One thing I was disappointed by is that they really didn't get into the whole good vs evil thing, in fact the angels that sided with Lucifer explain that it isn't so clear cut, however when you meet Lucifer he's really just the evil devil the Bible makes him out to be, there were no shades of grey there, so I couldn't figure out how some of the angels sided with him and felt that they could still be good guys (which they were, but kind of didn't make sense). A lot more could have been done with that aspect, after all the Throne comes off of completely selfish and in the wrong, the angels were not allowed to love each other since that takes away from the adoration they owe their creator, so there was some justification for a revolt, that absolute good wasn't all that good either.
Now the next book must have been a "Hey, my series is popular but it's finished now, how do I still manage to write more in this world?" Well you write a book from the POV of another character, in this case Cam (kind of like the Twilight series where the first book is rewritten from the POV of the male lead...but I have higher hopes for this one since Cam has his own story to tell). I didn't feel it added much to the series, and was very predictable, but I did enjoy Lucifer making Cam age prematurely, giving him a receding hairline and a paunch. Usually YA novels don't mess with the swoonworthiness of their protagonists!
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