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Summary
Summary
A thrilling epic about an ancient clash reignited in our time- between a hidden society and heaven's darkest creatures
There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bore children to them.
Genesis 6:5
Sister Evangeline was just a girl when her father entrusted her to the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration in upstate New York. Now, at twenty-three, her discovery of a 1943 letter from the famous philanthropist Abigail Rockefeller to the late mother superior of Saint Rose Convent plunges Evangeline into a secret history that stretches back a thousand years: an ancient conflict between the Society of Angelologists and the monstrously beautiful descendants of angels and humans, the Nephilim.
For the secrets these letters guard are desperately coveted by the once-powerful Nephilim, who aim to perpetuate war, subvert the good in humanity, and dominate mankind. Generations of angelologists have devoted their lives to stopping them, and their shared mission, which Evangeline has long been destined to join, reaches from her bucolic abbey on the Hudson to the apex of insular wealth in New York, to the Montparnasse cemetery in Paris and the mountains of Bulgaria.
Rich in history, full of mesmerizing characters, and wondrously conceived, Angelology blends biblical lore, the myth of Orpheus and the Miltonic visions of Paradise Lost into a riveting tale of ordinary people engaged in a battle that will determine the fate of the world.
Author Notes
Danielle Trussoni's first book, the memoir Falling Through the Earth , was selected as one of the Ten Best Books of 2006 by The New York Times Book Review . A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Danielle resides with her husband and two children in the south of France and regularly spends time in both Bulgaria and the United States. Her debut novel Angelology will be published in over thirty countries. Film rights were purchased outright by Sony Pictures with Will Smith's Overbrook Entertainment producing and Marc Forester directing.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Trussoni's complex and intricately plotted novel about an epic war between mortals and angels is, despite the heroic efforts of Susan Denaker, an unholy mess in the audio version. What readers relished-the labyrinthine plot, the accretion of suspense-becomes a morass of agonizingly slow description, invented mythologies, and a needlessly protracted setup. Sister Evangeline, a secretary at an upstate New York convent, receives a mysterious letter directing her to an artifact that is sought by a Nephilim-the offspring of a mortal and an angel-who is desperate to possess its power. Denaker proves her versatility in creating the diverse cast, but her melodic singsong cannot salvage the audiobook from tedium. Fans of The Da Vinci Code eager to give this one a listen should be directed to the hardcover. A Viking hardcover (Reviews, Jan. 25). (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Critically acclaimed memoirist Trussoni (Falling Through The Earth, 2006) breaks into the fiction market in a big way with an epic fantasy that combines a rich mythology with some Da Vinci Codestyle treasure-hunting. The contest between good and evil is waged not in the heavens but here on Earth, between warring factions of biblical scholars and heavenly hosts. The unusual central character is Sister Evangeline, a 23-year-old nun at St. Rose Convent outside New York City. In the course of her work, she stumbles across a mislaid correspondence between philanthropist Abigail Rockefeller and the convent's founding abbess concerning an astonishing 1943 discovery in the mountains of Greece. Simultaneously, the book introduces Percival Grigori, a critically ill, once-winged member of one of the most powerful families in an ancient race of beings born of a union between fallen angels and human beings: the Nephilim. These parasitic creatures, the "giants" referred to in the sixth chapter of Genesis, have engaged in spiritual warfare for generations with the Society of Angelologists, a group that included Evangeline's parents. "It has been one continuous struggle from the very beginning," says one of Evangeline's comrades-in-arms. "St. Thomas Aquinas believed that the dark angels fell within twenty seconds of creationtheir evil nature cracked the perfection of the universe almost instantly, leaving a terrible fissure between good and evil." As Evangeline and Grigori are drawn into conflict over control of a powerful artifact, the lyre of the mythical Orpheus, Trussoni constructs a marathon narrative arc, ending the volume with a satisfying, if startling, transformation. A film adaptation and a sequel are already waiting in the wings. An ambitious adventure story with enough literary heft and religious fervor to satisfy anyone able to embrace its imaginative conceits and Byzantine plot. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Through the door opened by The DaVinci Code comes Trussoni's entry in the hugger-mugger religious-society suspense subgenre, its textured prose as seamless as the never-ending stream of prayers offered up by St. Rose Convent's Sisters of Perpetual Adoration. In that institution, celebrated for its angelic texts, lives Sister Evangeline, who prays, tends to library matters, and has become a creature of obedience and duty since her father brought her there when she was 12, two years after her mother's death. The scholar Verlaine seeks concrete evidence linking the convent to Abigail Rockefeller, and before you can say, I found this letter, the multilayered process of Evangeline's transformation has begun. The story takes flight in eminently readable fashion, effortlessly folding in technical information about things angelic and the religious life. It's hard not to enjoy the secrets unearthed and appreciate what wings are to the angels who secretly walk among us a symbol of their blood, their breeding, . . . their position in the community. Displaying them properly brought power and prestige. Powerfully entertaining.--Scott, Whitney Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
There was a time in the 1990s when angels were impossible to escape. Guardians, muses, articles of trade, they covered T-shirts and bathroom accessories, bloomed on restaurant walls and peered from the edges of book jackets. Lately they may seem to have drifted away, but they've merely wandered into the literature of self-help and healing. It is now possible to buy "How to Hear Your Angels," "Working With Angels," "In the Arms of Angels" and "Angels 101," as well as angel dictionaries, encyclopedias and art books. Danielle Trussoni's first novel, "Angelology," should not be confused with any of these. Her rousing story turns on bad and fallen angels, particularly the offspring of matings between humans and heavenly beings. The hybrids known as Nephilim first appear in Genesis 6: "The sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose," and when "they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown." This might not sound so bad, but in Trussoni's handling, the Nephilim are "beautiful, iridescent monsters" who belong in cages. With shimmering golden skins and vast white wings sprouting from their backs, they frighten a 9-year-old girl named Evangeline. And how much more terrifying to hear one of the creatures declare, "Angel and devil. . . . One is but a shade of the other." Trussoni's previous book, "Falling Through the Earth," was a memoir of growing up with a father haunted by his past as a "tunnel rat" who searched below-ground for guerrillas during the Vietnam War. As an adult, Trussoni took her own trip to Vietnam and envisioned his life there, writing a tripartite biographyautobiography both redemptive and unsettling. With "Angelology" she revisits the subterranean burrows and the concern with paternity and inheritance, twisting them into an elegantly ambitious archival thriller in which knowledge dwells in the secret underground places, labyrinthine libraries and overlooked artifacts that have been hallmarks of the genre from "The Name of the Rose" and "Possession" to "Angels and Demons" and "The Historian." "Angelology" is richly allusive and vividly staged, with widescreen-ready visuals, a dewy but adaptable heroine and a dashingly cruel villain. One snowy day near the end of the last millennium, a young nun working in a Hudson Valley convent library discovers a secret correspondence between a former mother superior and the philanthropist Abigail Aldrich Rockefeller. After some further research and with a smitten art historian, Verlaine, at her side, the nun, Sister Evangeline, is drawn into a centuries-old struggle against the Nephilim - a fight in which both of her parents, now dead, were once engaged (hence the visit to the caged monsters). In under two days, she and Verlaine will quest after missing letters, books and an object so precious and singular that it has been commemorated in both angel iconography and the ancient myth of Orpheus. They will also find out what it means to wrestle with angels. DESPITE their extensive scholarship, neither Evangeline nor Verlaine is prepared (who could be?) for the Nephilim. The modern-day "Famous Ones" are nasty, selfish creatures who live in opulent apartments. Gorgeous, sensuous and wealthy, they are jealous of humans and vindictive toward God, cold to one another and rude to their servants, who belong to lesser angelic orders. During World War II, they attended Nazi parties. But even angels decline; their wings, which may be extensions of their lungs, sometimes rot away to ugly black nubs stuck in open sores. It is happening now to the formerly magnificent Percival Grigori - who, at the height of his powers, fell for a woman. Some of Trussoni's most exquisite writing touches on that old love story, which takes place in a flashback to a dreamy Montparnasse that could have come from the pages of Anaïs Nin. In 1939, two teenage girls - one brilliant and beautiful, the other plain but harder working - re-ceive special assignments at the Angelological Academy. One involves archival research, another an expedition to the Rhodope Mountains in Bulgaria, where scholars hope to recover the golden lyre that Orpheus gave to angels imprisoned in a measureless cavern. The repercussions of the girls' activities, both academic and amorous, could keep the Nephilim in check or let them triumph definitively over humans. And both lives are tangled with Evangeline's; the first girl will become her grandmother, the second a fellow nun with a story to share. Certain questions linger: Are angels corporeal, or are they concentrations of luminosity? In the absence of navels and nipples, do they still have the equipment with which to breed and be born? With Nephilim displaying their wings the way baboons show off some other parts, what is the relationship between human bodies and spirit? And how can the music of a lyre bring it all together? Like angels, the answers must be all around us. Evangeline discovers some of the convent's greatest secrets in its basement libraries; the athenaeum of the now vanished academy was also a web of forbidden rooms and hidden texts. In fact, all the world's an archive, as will become clear as Evangeline and company track Mrs. Rockefeller's angelological activities. TRUSSONI'S own research and invention are impressive, but what with diaries, letters and memoirs to be read, lectures recounted and revelatory conversations held, the narrative's pace sometimes slows - though, to her credit, she avoids the false tension of interrupted conversation and "I'll tell you more tomorrow." And her portrayal of the fighting over lost texts is inevitably more dynamic than her explication of them. When Evangeline's grandmother gets involved and the Nephilim army starts to swarm, the confrontations build to Miltonic proportions. The spirited female characters dig deep for unexpected strengths, and graciously allow Verlaine to participate. These moments are, as Sister Evangeline has imagined angelic encounters, "instances when the gossamer curtain between heaven and earth ripped and all of humanity witnessed the marvel of ethereal beings." Trussoni resorts to a few conventions, notably a James Bond-style showiness: the present-day angelologists go about their secret business in a vintage Porsche with a license plate that reads "ANGELL" There is, in fact, enough attention paid to car models for a Bond novel and enough information about fabrics for an episode of "Project Runway." Sometimes it's best to blink and move on, accepting that level of detail as part of another duality - the intermeshing of the physical world with the immaterial realm of spirit, nicely evoked here. It is a real pleasure to read sensory descriptions of the "sharp feline whine" of old brass hinges and the "musky smell of perfume that has begun to soften with age." Sensual and intellectual, "Angelology" is a terrifically clever thriller - more Eco than Brown, without the cloudy sentimentalism of New Age encomiums or Catholic treatises. It makes no apologies for its devices, and none are necessary. How else would it be possible to bring together the angels of the Bible and Apocrypha, the myth of Orpheus, Bulgarian geography, medieval monastics, the Rockefellers, Nazis, nuns and musicology? And how splendid that it has happened. A quest after an object that has been commemorated in both angel iconography and the myth of Orpheus. Susann Cokal, the author of the novels "Mirabilis" and "Breath and Bones," is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.
Library Journal Review
Trussoni's (www.danielletrussoni.com) memoir, Falling Through the Earth, was a New York Times Book Review Best Book of 2006. In her debut novel, set at turns in late 20th-century New York City and World War II Europe, Sister Evangeline discovers an obscure correspondence that plunges her into a secret battle between the Society of Angelologists and the descendants of angels and humans, the Nephilim. Actress/narrator Susan Denaker (Before You Know Kindness) delivers an even performance, employing convincing accents for several of the characters, though one wonders whether a different narrator reading the World War II section might have better set off the book's two parts. This long novel blends suspense and the supernatural in a manner reminiscent of Dan Brown, Elizabeth Kostova, and even Stephenie Meyer and would be enjoyed by their readers. [The Viking hc received a starred review, LJ 1/10.-Ed.]-David Faucheux, Louisiana Audio Information & Reading Svc., Lafayette (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.