Being an Indie author myself, I’m working on finding and reading other Indie novels that I can wholeheartedly recommend. This is one of those novels. Angelfall is the first in Indie author Susan Ee’s Penryn and the End of Days YA series. And wow, it packs an angelic punch. Ee borrowed her angel lore from the Book of Enoch, found with the Dead Sea Scrolls. These are no soft, feathery angels watching over us from the corners of greeting cards. They are the angels of the Apocalypse, wielding wicked swords and out to kick our sinful human butts.

Main character Penryn is a tough teen from Silicon Valley (she was named after a highway exit), who has grown up with a schizophrenic mother and disabled younger sister. She is just trying to keep her dysfunctional little family fed in the days after the Apocalypse, when she happens onto a fight between two angels. She gets involved, necessitating a partnership with an injured angel, Raffe. Their relationship is tense at best, as it should be when the conquered have to cooperate with conquerors. What Penryn and Raffe see and experience is often dark and disturbing, and the ending is decidedly bizarre. But it’s all fascinating and really, really well-written.

Ee’s writing style is taut, her world-building is detailed, and the editing is superb. She obviously took time to perfect her manuscript before putting it out there for public consumption. The quality is evident throughout. Given my other identity as a psychologist, I especially appreciated how she writes Penryn’s mentally ill mother. Ee realistically captures the swings between her moments of sanity and bouts with madness. The mother is one of the most interesting characters, and I look forward to seeing what part she will play as the series continues.

That said, I had trouble with how Ee chose to portray the angels. They seemed a lot too human in their speech, personalities, ambitions and desires. While that may have been the point she was going for, it was hard to envision how the angels were different from us, apart from purely physical qualities like, you know, wings sprouting out of their backs. Their motivations for doing things, in particular, were indistinguishable from human motivations. Which detracted from the story, IMO. I’d hope avenging angels would have some other reason for squashing human civilization under their collective thumbs than pure power-grabbing, for heaven’s sake (sorry, couldn’t resist).

Angelfall is racking up buzz, and rightly so. Give it a read. You might politely pass on your next opportunity to hang with angels, but I’m willing to bet you’ll look forward to the next installment in the series.