Book Review: Strange Angels (Strange Angels, #1)

Title: Strange Angels (Strange Angels, #1)
Author: Lili St. Crow (pseudonym for Lilith Saintcrow)
Publisher: Razorbill (a division of Penguin Group USA), 2009
Date read: November 26th, 2010
Page total: 293 pages
Genre(s): Urban Fantasy; Young Adult
First Line of the book: I didn’t tell Dad about Grandma’s white owl. I know I should have.

Dad? Zombie. Mom? Long gone. Me? Well, that’s the scary part.
The Real World is a frightening place. Just ask sixteen-year old orphan Dru Anderson, a tough girl who has taken down her fair share of bad guys. She’s armed, dangerous, and ready to kill first and ask questions later. So it’s gonna take her a while to figure out who she can trust…
[…]
Alone, terrified, and trapped, Dru’s going to need every inch of her wit and training to stay alive. The monsters have decided to hunt back - and this time, Dru’s on their menu. Chances of survival? Slim to none. If she can’t last until sunup, it’s game over…
(From the back of the book)





Do you have a paperback copy of Vampire Academy by Richelle Mead by some weird coincidence? There is a sneak peek of Strange Angles at the end of the book, unless you’ve got on old version of the book. That’s how I got to know this book - so this excerpt-from-another-book-at-the-end-of-a-famous-book-advertisement-strategy worked this time.
Back to the book. This book was… weird. Like, very strange. I know it’s not the best way to describe a book, not to mention the nicest, but I found it weirdly good in a weird-good way, mostly because I can’t decide whether I like this book or not.
The book is packed with action because Dru is a hunter who hunts all kind of creatures that are not supposed to exist, including werwulfen (=werewolves), upir (=suckers=vampires), zombies, poltergeist, ghost, well, you get the picture. (For some reasons, the author prefers other names for mythical creatures, probably to distinguish them from other urban fantasies.) As you can imagine, there are plenty of action scenes, most of them involving guns, body combat and some mean kicks. And although my head was reeling from all those action scenes, the actual plot was very slow. The whole book felt like a long, long prologue for the real story, as if the real plot would take off in the second book. It wasn’t exactly boring but if you take out the action scenes, all you have is Dru’s encounter with Graves and how his life gets complicated as he gets involved with Real World.
Another thing I’m not very happy with is that Dru doesn’t describe the Real World to the readers, it’s like as if she thinks we know about it already. It irritated me a lot, but real explanation comes later in the book with other crucial information, and it’s worth waiting.
All in all, it was a compelling, funny read, and I’ll most definitely read the second book, because the first one ends with a cliff hanger and most importantly, I’ve got the feeling, it’ll be much better than the first book.





Quotes:

"Most girls go through a gawky stage, but I’m beginning to think mine will be a lifelong thing. It doesn’t bother me too much. Better to be strong than pretty and useless. I’ll take a plain girl with her head screwed on right over a cheerleader any day."

"I've been bitten, beat up, tied to a bed, James Bonded out, and now you finish off by choking a goddamn teacher!"

"You're not dead. You're too goddamn annoying to be dead."

"I guess since the groin is the center of a guy's world, he rarely guesses it isn't the center of yours."