Review: Angelfire by Courtney Allison Moulton

Angelfire by Courtney Allison Moulton

Release Date: February 15, 2011
Publisher: Katherine Tegen Books/HarperCollins
Age Group: Young Adult
Pages: 464
Buy the book

First there are nightmares.

Every night Ellie is haunted by terrifying dreams of monstrous creatures that are hunting her, killing her.

Then come the memories.

When Ellie meets Will, she feels on the verge of remembering something just beyond her grasp. His attention is intense and romantic, and Ellie feels like her soul has known him for centuries. On her seventeenth birthday, on a dark street at midnight, Will awakens Ellie’s power, and she knows that she can fight the creatures that stalk her in the grim darkness. Only Will holds the key to Ellie’s memories, whole lifetimes of them, and when she looks at him, she can no longer pretend anything was just a dream.

Now she must hunt.

Ellie has power that no one can match, and her role is to hunt and kill the reapers that prey on human souls. But in order to survive the dangerous and ancient battle of the angels and the Fallen, she must also hunt for the secrets of her past lives and truths that may be too frightening to remember.

People can’t seem to say enough about the fight scenes in Courtney Allison Moulton’s Angelfire and apparently I’m about to be one of them because, seriously, these fight scenes are amazing. They are cinematic, beautifully written, and horror-movie-level violent. What’s more outstanding is that each fight scene stands out on its own. I planned to count how many fight scenes there were in this book, but I stopped because doing so was that daunting and, yet, Moulton manages to keep each one fresh.

Ellie is a likable protagonist who has to balance her duties fighting reapers and her regular life as a teenage girl. She has an Edward-style protector, but she’s also the type of girl who doesn’t really need one. Still, Will, Ellie’s guardian and love interest, would be enough to make anyone play damsel in distress if he was doing the saving.

I was particularly impressed by the reveals that Moulton continued to add throughout the story, all related back to her intricate mythology that literally spans centuries. I can’t wait to see where Moulton takes the series. The stakes are still high. The romance is still tense. And it’s hard not to wonder what all Ellie will be forced to give up by the end of her story.

Advertisement