Ordinary Angels by India DrummondMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I think I can best describe this book as a Ghost Whisperer meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It does feature a young woman who has a secret talent for seeing and talking to the ghosts of those long since dead and something even more unusual than ghosts steps into her life.
In the guise of a postman an Angel has decided to get a closer perspective on human life and Zoe is swept up into the celestial affairs of these higher beings. Things take a turn for the worse in their budding relationship when Alexander ends up being cast down from grace due to their attraction and her ghost best friend msyteriously vanishes and a human dies in his haunting place. Zoe becomes his advocate and works between and across worlds, discovering not only how the celestial bodies of Angels work in their own society (and on a more personal intimate level) but how even after death and beyond everyone and everything is never as they appear. Motives, lies, laws and secrets of the past will pull and push Zoe's new relationship to the limits as she tries to discover the truth about her deceased friend and on the way her powers become stronger and scarier so on top of providing divine justice and relationship troubles Zoe must find it in herself to make sure her growing powers do not prove to be the cause of her own downfall.
When you first read the story you really are thrown into the deep end and the situation is imemdiatly made clear yet despite it being told in third person it feels remarkably like a first person narrative due to the closeness the narrator takes to Zoe and it helps the story flow much easier. Although the story is set in America it didn't feel entirely like America to me. But I kind of read on despite that. At first the story does seem to centre on Zoe and Alexander's relationship and the complications of it - it's only after many chapters you reach the part of Henry's disappearence that you really grip the pages as events and circumstances all become entwined in a major divine puzzle you can't help follow Zoe through to work out.
On the whole though it is a delightful read and I love the darkness India has given all her angels, even the good ones when they show their true colours in a way most of us wouldn't believe but it really does define the characters as each Angel has a different form. It is funny, touching and quite gripping in places and is definitely a more adult and unique twist on the scenario of Angels and Humans in love compared to what Angel fiction there is in YA. I personally don't believe the depiction on the cover image is what I imagined Zoe to be, she in my mind is quite a plain yet pretty gal but I guess in the end she also turns out to be a beautiful killer.
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You can buy and download Ordinary Angels via Amazon here -
And visit India's blog site here - http://www.indiadrummond.com/my-fiction/ordinary-angels/
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