Angelology by Danielle Trussoni

Danielle Trussoni's Angelology was supposed to be my Pre-Pub post this past Saturday, but seeing as how I'm now so late with it that today is the official release date...

I first mentioned this book last Wednesday when I wrote about Elizabeth Kostova's debut, The Historian. You see everything about Angelology really brings me back to the whole Historian experience. And I do mean the WHOLE experience: the excitement I felt post-release when I couldn't wait to get my hands on it, and the lush experience of losing myself in that fantastic novel.

Angelology definitely lived up to these expectations. And like The Historian, I found that Angelology took me a lot longer to finish than usual -- as might be obvious by the fact that I delayed posting this.

The book concerns a group of angelologists who have been studying the Nephilim for generations, in hopes that they might defeat these beings once and for all. The Nephilim, according to literature, are the descendants of the Watchers (angels) and their human lovers. The Watchers were male and it is said that they gave up everything when they fell in love with human women. Their children, however, were dangerous beings who brought warfare to the human race. The Watchers were punished and imprisoned deep beneath the earth while the Nephilim infiltrated the human population. Present day, Sister Evangeline, a nun with the St. Rose convent in Milton, New York, has received an odd request: a man named Verlaine has been hired to find a connection between Abigail Rockefeller and his clients and he believes that she may have been in contact with one of the nuns at the convent during the period he is researching. What neither of them know is that Abigail Rockefeller helped fund an expedition to find something that could have given the angelologists a great advantage over the Nephilim. Verlaine's letter plunges both of them into an ages old battle between man and angel, and the outcome may depend on their being able to unravel the puzzle.

The story is fairly involved for a brief synopsis, but it's definitely what I've been waiting for in terms of the "angels as the new vampires" trend. No doubt readers who find titles like The Historian to be dense and overwhelming, will feel the same about Angelology -- it's a style that's not for every reader out there. Personally, while I enjoy curling up with (and finishing) a new book every other night, I rather like having the occasional long read. Evangeline, Verlaine, the nuns of St. Rose, and the angelologists kept me enthralled for almost a week and it was with some regret that I said goodbye to them with the final page.

But, I've heard that Trussoni may be working on a new Angelology title. If that's the case, I'll be on the edge of my seat until it comes out!

For those of you in the Denver area, Trussoni will be at the Colfax Tattered Cover on March 16. Additional tour dates can be found on the In Person page of her website (link at the top of this post).