Hello everyone!
Do you remember sometime right after New Year's when I posted a review on here about a book that shared the story of a guardian angel and his charge?
Well, I found the sequel!
Or, in more precise terms, I found the first official book in the series after the prequel I read through BookSirens.
If you've ever had the chance to read that other review of mine, you'll know that I absolutely LOVED the idea of guardian angels, and that the author, Veronica Conley, did a fantastic job at creating an environment for these angels to live and thrive in, giving them personalities and quirks, and on top of it all some really good backbones for a further story.
Imagine my surprise and delight, then, to see that the first book of The Greater Angels of the Empyrean was ALSO on BookSirens!
I snatched that ARC up so fast like you wouldn't believe.
Then I gobbled up Angel Off Limits in one day.
guardian angel Arathiel is assigned to Amelia, but is much more concerned about her adopted sister, Coralyn, who seems to be a magnet for disaster - but equally she's a dead ringer for one of the mortals he USED to guard (and got into a relationship with, which didn't end well) and it turns out she's actually her descendant.
She also has a couple near-death experiences and Arathiel manages to physically save her even though he shouldn't be able to, and at the end of the prequel, when Amelia states quite clearly that she doesn't believe in angels or demons or anything of the sort, Arathiel is reassigned.
To Coralyn.
This is where Angel Off Limits begins.
Arathiel has more than 99 problems, in all honesty, but his most pressing one is probably the fact that Coralyn can see him, which means that he's always just constantly THERE, and she can have conversations with him which might make people think she's insane.
Given that she's trying to figure out what her twin is up to (hoping it isn't drugs) and dealing with what she hopes isn't the onset of her own schizophrenia, Cora is rightly worried.
Still, she DOES listen (moderately) when Arathiel gives her suggestions about which way to go or what to do so that she can avoid getting herself killed while she's at it, even though she's annoyed at him most of the time and thinks he's a figment of her imagination.
The near-death experiences start up again around that time.
Arathiel is already concerned - he's never actually had to avert SO MANY disasters from one mortal before - but then she nearly gets taken out by black ice, and she somehow finds the time to kiss him, too.
Talk about issues.
From then on, it's a bit of a pendulum for the two of them, because not only are there just the regular, run-of-the-mill sort of dangers (a guardian angel's work is never done), there's also demonic possession and demons coming after Cora, trying to kill her.
The first one possesses one of her landlords, Eric. He tries to take her out with a knife.
The second one possesses the driver/bodyguard of the car she's in, Mike. He nearly crashes the lot of them, including Justin, the billionaire who believes Cora but also wants to date her sister.
Unfortunately, her sister already has a boyfriend.
And said boyfriend is possession number three, who almost suffocates her with a pillow.
During all of this, Arathiel (and Librabis, who makes his own appearance as Justin's guardian angel and who is DELIGHTED by the fact Cora can see and hear him, which makes things doubly difficult for her since he's a chatterbox) sort of manages to get her out okay, but the problem is that he can't detect threats from below, from Hell, like he can mortal ones, and he takes it up with his superiors.
He's in deep trouble anyway because of the fact that Uriel, one of the other princes, doesn't believe he had nothing to do with Amelia not believing in angels, so after Cora passes Arathiel has to serve his penance as a lesser angel, but he's got bigger fish to fry at the moment.
He'll deal with his community service, no worries.
But first he's terrified that he took that one last step with Cora like he did with her ancestor, Ysabel, when he holds her in his arms (and wings) as she sleeps, and nearly does something more in the morning. This could be a direct violation of the second rule guardian angels have to follow (their mortals should never know they exist), so he says some really nasty things and hightails it out of there to try and do damage control.
Enter possession number four, Cora's other landlord, Luke, who uses hellfire to try and burn her to death.
But Arathiel's words have some unforeseen consequences, or at least some that haven't been seen in millennia, because Gabriel (the chief angel) has to unearth her own dinosaur copy of the guidebook for guardian angels, where she finds the passage which explains that, because Cora's faith is so shaken, she's in purgatory, and needs to either not believe anymore, or believe again, and only then will Arathiel be able to return to her side or even sense her once more (guardian angels have a unique sense of their charges).
And she does. She jumps out the window and trusts to fate, which brings her Arathiel and they hightail it away from the demon once more.
Now without a place to go, given her sister wants to institutionalize her and her twin brother doesn't want to see her for some reason (by the way, he explains that they're from a long line of supernatural
psychics and he can see demons, but most of their line died young
because of it), Cora and Arathiel head to Starbucks where she's eventually tracked down by none other than Justin.
Justin being the determined guy that he is, he takes Cora along with him, also promises he's not giving up on Amelia and their potential future relationship (because for some reason it's not enough to find your boyfriend in your little sister's room in the middle of the night to dump him), but tells Cora he's found her a safe apartment to rent, on consecrated ground.
The landlord's name is Cassiel.
Oh yeah, the angels are getting in on the gig now.
See, a subplot in the book (other than Arathiel heading over to his friend Laylah's to try and sex out his problems and ending up talking to her about them) is that Gabriel and her brothers received a prophecy, all six brothers, from six seers, so thirty-six times, about the fact that two of them would fall and a mortal's blood would have to be shed to restart time.
Gabriel spends the majority of the book (when she isn't trying to keep the angels in line) hunting down the seers, who've all mysteriously died, and eventually finds the one psychic Cora herself visits at the beginning of the book, who explains that Cora is the mortal from the prophecy (is it Cora or her brother Carter, though?).
This means Cora is EXTREMELY important, so not only is Gabriel furious with Arathiel for his self-flogging which is causing the guardian relationship issues (he's still hung up over what happened with Ysabel and how he thinks he screwed up, but Gabriel's pissed off and tells him it was Ysabel's CHOICE and he didn't make her do anything, so could he please quit it?) but girl doesn't even have time to moisturize properly.
That's making her extra cranky.
Add the fact that Raphael owes Cora a favour (which he conveniently doesn't mention to Gabriel, by and by) and Cassiel now enters the game in all his grumpy glory to try and see what this is all about, and you can tell it's a supernatural soap opera just WAITING to happen.
The book is fun, witty, and gives a little more depth to the angels, which to be honest is everything I could ever want. I wasn't so much interested in the mortal dramas as I was enchanted watching the angels being ... complete drama queens, let's put it that way. It's like having a family-run company where everyone does whatever they want and the CEO is losing her mind over it.
It's fantastic. I love it!
Also, Arathiel is supposed to be important to the prophecy, too, as he used to be 'king of the world' in his mortal life, but the angels erased that from his soul, and I'm not entirely sure if they didn't make up a history for him, too. Plus, his original planet is SUPPOSED to be Terraland/ia, but come on, terra means Earth - I think we can all see where this is going.
Cora was a bit off for me in this one, mostly because she acted a whole lot like a teenager in many situations as opposed to the adult she supposedly should be, but I'm not sure if that's intentional or if it's just me. In any case, she's now under Cassiel's watch, so we'll see what happens with THAT.
I live for these angelic interactions. I can't WAIT for the second book!
The one thing I'm wondering though is this: during the runaway car thing, Librabis grabbed his charge and almost buckled him in, but Arathiel couldn't physically interfere when Cora was being suffocated, so that one might need some polishing.
Other than that, however, another delightful read! I highly recommend this series if you haven't started already, because it is HILARIOUS.
And can somebody please give me more Librabis. He is LIFE and I am HERE for it!
xx
*image not mine
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