Monday, March 12, 2012

Review: Wings of the Wicked by Courtney Allison Moulton

Title: Wings of the Wicked
Author: Courtney Allison Moulton
Publisher: Katherine Tegen Books, HarperCollins
Publish Date: January 31, 2012
Genre: YA, paranormal
Pages: 319 (ebook)
Series: Angelfire
1. Angelfire (review)
2. Wings of the Wicked
3. Untitled (expected pub 2013)

**WARNING: SPOILERS**
Synopsis:
Life as the Preliator is harder than Ellie ever imagined.
Balancing real life with the responsibility of being Heaven’s warrior is a challenge for Ellie. Her relationship with Will has become all business, though they both long for each other. And now that the secret of who she really is has come out, so have Hell’s strongest reapers. Grown bold and more vicious, the demonic threaten her in the light of day and stalk her in the night.

She’s been warned.
Cadan, a demonic reaper, comes to her with information about Bastian’s new plan to destroy Ellie’s soul and use an ancient relic to wake all the souls of the damned and unleash them upon humanity. As she fights to stay ahead of Bastian’s schemes , the revelations about those closest to her awaken a dark power within Ellie that threatens to destroy everything—including herself.

She’ll be betrayed.
Treachery comes even from those whom she loves, and Ellie is broken by the deaths of those who stood beside her in this Heavenly war. Still, she must find a way to save the world, herself, and her love for Will. If she fails, there will be hell to pay.


What an explosive sophomore novel for Courtney! I was so excited to hop back into Ellie’s story and see what challenges she was going to face next. There were quite a few twists and turns that I wasn’t expecting. It was also a lot more risque than the first. I think that Courtney took some chances this time around in terms of more taboo topics, especially for YA. But the story was just as amazing. I enjoyed the romance a lot because it had more layers. It wasn’t just relationship building, it was conflict, both internal and external, and desire.

Ellie is the same kickass girl that we met in Angelfire. She’s been training and patrolling and trying to come to terms with the fact that she’s really the archangel Gabriel. Things are made even harder for her because of the distance Will is trying to keep from her. He’s afraid of the consequences from Michael if he disobeys and pursues more of a relationship with Ellie aside from the Preliator-Guardian relationship. It was easy to see the difficulties both Ellie and Will were having by trying to keep the relationship professional.

We got to see a lot more of Nathaniel and Lauren in this book, which I thought was awesome. They’re Will’s family and I feel like getting to know them helps us to understand Will a bit better. Cadan is a great addition to this novel. We met him in the first, but really get to know him in the second. We see him as a person with feelings rather than as a demonic reaper. We also learn a lot of his secrets.

The storyline was just as exciting as the first. Ellie’s got the toughest demonic reapers coming after her so that Bastian can perform a ritual that will stop her from ever being reincarnated again, by killing her soul. But Ellie still wants to hold onto her human life: her friends, her school, her family. I think that makes her a lot more relatable. Not a lot of people can relate to being a reincarnated archangel stuck in a teenaged human body, but they can relate to things in their life changing and trying to hold onto the constants. That’s one of my favourite things about Ellie as a character, and Courtney’s writing.

This review is kind of all over the place, but I basically want you to know that this second novel matches the first perfectly, that the characters and the writing are perfect continuations of the first, and that this is one sequel that you do not want to miss. Now I’m dying waiting for the next one, since Courtney left it off on a huge cliffhanger!

buy the book from The Book Depository, free delivery

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