Torment by Lauren Kate

I would say there are spoilers for Fallen in this review, but honestly, the plot of Fallen is so predictable that you know from the moment you read the blurb that girl and boy will get together, so there really is no need. Anyway, the plot of Torment follows on from that of Fallen, and has a few added ‘twists’, which Fallen was lacking in; Luce and Daniel have to separate after finally having found each other because he has to kill the people who want to kill her, so Luce is hidden at a special school for Nephilim (the offspring of fallen angels and humans), where she learns a lot of things – about herself, the shadows that she sees…and Daniel through manipulating the shadows to see into the past, which isn’t quite his version…

I think the main reason I read and reviewed Torment (anyone else find hilarious irony in the title?) was so I could have its cover on my blog–I don’t know how each cover of the series is made to be so devastatingly gorgeous, but serious kudos to the designers, although it does trick people into reading the garbage inside–and to warn others who have not yet made the mistake of carrying on with the Fallen series to not do so.

I should mention the good points about Torment first – with every book she writes, Kate’s writing improves quite a considerable amount, and whilst I preferred the plot of Fallen as it was much less confusing and more interesting, the writing was a lot better here, although Kate annoyingly clearly likes to consult a thesaurus every now and then. Also, the cover is stunning, as I keep on mentioning, but seriously that is worth a star all on its own!

Now the bad: what is it with YA romance that when you fall in lurve, you cannot be even comprehend being separated for weeks; yes, you read that right – not seconds or minutes or even hours but entire weeks – even if it is for their own safety it just makes everything laughable, especially when both concerned are annoying characters – I always find Kate’s secondary characters to be far more interesting than the protagonists. I found Torment pretty dull with a slow pace, and quite a few pages too many; but then when things started to happen, it got really confusing and left more questions than answers.

To me it speaks volumes that the snippets of praise for Fallen is from the Sun (a vile, lying, not-to-be-trusted scumbag of a newspaper) and rabid fans, who claim Kate is a “genius” and that Fallen was “the most romantic page-turner of all time” – seriously?! Ooh, and we have ANOTHER gorgeous boy who falls in lurve with Luce, whose lurve tale is a night-time story to Nephilim for reasons completely unknown – it can’t possibly because she’s interesting or witty, as throughout eight hundred pages I haven’t seen a shred of evidence showing these traits – it’s inexplicable why most of the couples who fall in love in YA these days actually do – her only character development is to get even more annoying and even more stupid. 

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[SYNOPSIS: In Torment fallen angel Daniel and his mortal love Lucinda think they are safe but evil forces are massing against them. As Luce learns more about her past, and discovers that the lives she’s already lived hold the key to her future happiness; she starts to wonder if Daniel has told her the whole truth. What if his version of events isn’t the way things happened? What if that means that she’s really meant to be with someone else?]