Angel Down
I was so excited to read this book as it seemed like a great intersection of my main genre interests – an angel falls in the middle of a battlefield? – and more “high-brow” reading – it won the Pulitzer! And honestly I think a rating of 3 is padding it a bit for reasons of the latter.
In the end it felt so much like every other war book we had to read in high school: ugly and dark in all the same ways. And I get that, I don’t think it’s bad that books about war be dark and ugly; they should be! But I don’t really need convincing there. The addition of a fallen angel didn’t really seem to add anything unique—until maybe the climax, but by then it was too late, for me.
On top of all of that, the “one single sentence” gimmick was… eh? It added a kind of breathlessness to the piece that worked fine, but also: just replacing all your periods with “and” barely counts as an achievement. I was kind of hoping for a true, well-worked run-on sentence—one that used all the tricks of the trade to prevent a sentence from ever ending—but it was mostly just regular writing with a whole lot of extra “and”s.