The Angel's Cut
Length Of Time In Possession : 18 months
One of my favourite novels of 2011 was The Vintner's Luck by Elizabeth Knox. The story of a love affair between an Angel and a human, the Vintner's Luck is beautifully written, philosophical, moving, compelling and lyrical. It is a book I will never hesitate to recommend.
It was with some trepidation that I bought the sequel, and despite having bought it I didn't read it for a further 18 months. Finding the story complete, I didn't see how Knox could either better or equal The Vintner's Luck with a second tale, and I'm very sad to say I was right.
Following the events of that novel, the immortal angel Xas has become a pilot, so he can continue to savour the sensation of flight, life as a pilot takes him to America where he becomes a stunt pilot for the movies and we are introduced to several new characters: Flora, Millie, Conrad Cole and Conrad Crow.
These characters became the problem for me, I completely failed to feel involved with any of them and repeatedly found myself switching off entirely which made it difficult to keep up with the natural flow. There are too many Conrads and this gets confusing. I thought about abandoning the book more than once but felt sad to do so.
The two things that saved the book and kept me reading were the sequences (too few, too short) in which connections were made to Sobran and Xas's former life in France and other things from The Vintner's Luck and those sequences where Xas encounters and debates with Lucifer. These parts are really good but perhaps only amount to 5% of the novel.
This novel was super disappointing in comparison to how much I adore its predecessor.
Destination : Ebook storage
5/10
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