"Angelfire" by Courtney Allison Moulton

From Goodreads: "This debut, the first novel in a trilogy, is achingly romantic, terrifying, and filled with blistering action.

When seventeen-year-old Ellie starts seeing reapers - monstrous creatures who devour humans and send their souls to Hell - she finds herself on the front lines of a supernatural war between archangels and the Fallen and faced with the possible destruction of her soul.

A mysterious boy named Will reveals she is the reincarnation of an ancient warrior, the only one capable of wielding swords of angelfire to fight the reapers, and he is an immortal sworn to protect her in battle. Now that Ellie's powers have been awakened, a powerful reaper called Bastian has come forward to challenge her. He has employed a fierce assassin to eliminate her - an assassin who has already killed her once.

While balancing her dwindling social life and reaper-hunting duties, she and Will discover Bastian is searching for a dormant creature believed to be a true soul reaper. Bastian plans to use this weapon to ignite the End of Days and to destroy Ellie's soul, ending her rebirth cycle forever. Now, she must face an army of Bastian's most frightening reapers, prevent the soul reaper from consuming her soul, and uncover the secrets of her past lives - including truths that may be too frightening to remember."

I have read a number of reviews of this book where the reviewer goes on and on about how superficial Ellie is (ie. all she cares about is how cute her car is, designer clothing, and whatnot) and I will be the first to admit that my superficiality meter (as I like to call is) goes off pretty quickly when I read YA books, but I didn't find it going off whatsoever in this book. There were maybe 2 times (at most) where I thought to myself, "Ellie, should you really be all that concerned about wearing make-up when there are crazy reapers trying to kill you?" and compared to a lot of YA books that is minuscule.

This book is super unique and not like anything I have ever read before (though if I had to compare Ellie's abilities to another book characters abilities I would say that her abilities are somewhat similar to shadowhunters, but Ellie's abilities might just be a bit more bad-ass because she can make her swords appear at any time unlike shadowhunters' steles/ weapons where they have to fumble to grab them whenever they need them) and this may just be the best take on angels I have ever seen before. 

As for the boy of the book, Will? Well, all I gotta say is that I have another boy to add to my list "Book Boys who Avery Swoon's Over". At first it seemed like he wasn't going to have much of a personality because he was quite serious all of the time, but that quickly changed, and it was clear that he was such a caring and sweet guy and that he would do everything in his power, even risk his life, to protect Ellie.

All in all I think that no one will be disappointed by this book. It is clear that Courtney has quite the writing career ahead of her and dare I say it... She may just be the next Cassie Clare! I cannot wait for the next book in the series "Wings of the Wicked"! 


Rating: 10/10