The Darkangel by Meredith Ann Pierce

[meganbmoore]

The Darkangel is the first part of a trilogy(is this YA?  The publisher, and the listing of recommended books in the other two seems to indicate that, but the story really doesn't feel it to me.  But then, I haven't read a lot of YA yet.  Anyway...) about Aeriel, a servant girl who lives in a desert land.  When Eoduin, Aeriel's friend and master, is taken by the Darkangel who terrorizes their land, Aeriel sets out to get her back, both out of friendship, and because she knows that only punishment and eventually being sold off are all that await her with Eoduin's family now.  Aeriel is captured by the Darkangel herself, however, and becomes a servant in his household.  There, she learns the Eoduin became the thirteenth wife of the Darkangel and has become a soulless wraith who is a madwoman and little more than skin and bones, and indistinguishable from the other twelve wives.  Further, she learns that when the Darkangel takes a fourteenth wife in another year, his mother will make him into one of the seven vampyre lords who will take over the world, and Aeriel escapes his palace with the help of the duarough, a dwarven mage who lives under the castle, and sets off on a quest to free him and the wraith wives.

The be honest, if Aeriel's chief goal had been to save Irrylath, the Darkangel, I doubt I could have supported the book.  Instead, saving Irrylath is a necessity if she wants to save the wraith wives, hoping that Eoduin really is one of them, and still alive, and saving them is her main goal.  While she's drawn to Irrylath, it's made clear that it's a mixture of pity and his supernatural abilities, not out of some deep lust for his being a hot vampire, and she hates herself for it.  Irrylath, meanwhile, is thankfully not some goth emoboy angsting for his lost soul.  He doesn't even know why anyone would want one, save for power.  Instead, he really is a monster, one with shreds of humanity, but more a mad creature to be pitied but feared than a romantic figure.  In a lot of ways, he's more of a petty, spoiled, evil child than anything else.  To be completely honest, I'm not convinced yet that he's worth all the trouble Aeriel is going through for him, but I'm willing to be convinced.

Pierce also brings in a lot of various mythologies.  While the world as a whole has something of a middle-eastern feel to it, there are also definite European feel to the mytharc, and various plotpoints seem to be drawn from specific fables of both.  I'm not sure what I think of Irrylath or the romance yet, but I do like Aeriel, and the mytharc that's developing, and how the resolution of one quest resulted in another, bigger quest emerging.

Comments

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

...she learns...has become a soulless wraith who is a madwoman and little more than skin and bones, and indistinguishable from the other twelve wives

Man. I hate it when that happens to me.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

My reaction to that plot point was "wow, already?" because it'd only been a couple months, and they apparently all looked just alike.

[magicnoire.livejournal.com]

Don't we all.

[shadawyn.livejournal.com]

Oooh. Reading your review makes me want to re-read this one. It's been about 12 years...

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

In theory, I shall get it all read this weekend. (Possibly by the end of tomorrow...this one read very fast.)

[magicnoire.livejournal.com]

The Darkangel trilogy is indeed YA.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

That's what I thought. It was the polygamy and torture of what passes as small cute animals and ranting about how he was going to kill her that was making me wonder.

[magicnoire.livejournal.com]

You'd be surprised at what can be found in the YA genre.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Yes. I believe it was rachelmanija who posted a poll a while back that almost scared me off YA forever.

[magicnoire.livejournal.com]

Most Depressing YA Ever?

Yeah.

The one that won is like one of my favorite books. lol

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Which one was it?

[magicnoire.livejournal.com]

Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer.

The companion book, the dead & the gone, just came out this past week. I didn't think it was as good but I also think that's because I keep comparing it to LAWKI. People who've never read LAWKI seem to think d&g was as scary as I thought LAWKI was. So.

[jennawaterford.livejournal.com]

I loved the first two books of this trilogy and HATED the last one so much, I'll probably never read another book by the woman.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Wasn't there a long wait between books?

[jennawaterford.livejournal.com]

No idea. I read them all after they were published on a recommendation. When I told the recommender my reaction, she said, "Oh, yeah. I forgot how they ended."

So be warned. You may still enjoy, but I didn't think she made the case for the ending she wrote, and it really ticked me off.

[the_rck]

There was a long enough gap between books two and three that I and my friends used the author's name as a curse for years. I think it was a decade. I know it was more than five years.

[desdenova.livejournal.com]

This was exactly my reaction. It's been a long time since I've read them, and I have forgotten a lot, so I could probably stand to read the first two again, but at the time, the third one retroactively ruined the entire series for me.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I also loved the second book (even more, actually) but hated the third. You can safely skip the third book.

One bad book didn't turn me off Pierce... but she's never written anything else that I loved half as much as the first two Darkangel books.

I don't care for Irrylath, but I love the supporting characters-- the faun, the desert people, the animals, and some people and animals who turn up in the next book. Also, the atmosphere is pure magic.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

I'm around 100 pages into the second book now and definately liking it a lot. I really wish I knew more about numbers in mythology, as there are a lot of important numbers here.

Irrylath is...ok, maybe? He really just seems to kind of be there. He mostly seems to just be sitting around feeling sorry for himself, even though he's now in a position to actually do something about it. Even if he were trying to get over his issues or struggling between who he was and who he is, I'd feel something, but if helping him were Aeriel's main motivation, it would probably throw me out of the book.

[queenofthorns.livejournal.com]

Heh! I loved this trilogy - it's more that the ending makes me sad than that I hated it. I still wish there had been a different ending, but you'll see how it goes :P

[filmi-girl.livejournal.com]

I really didn't enjoy this one at all! Maybe my expectations were too high.... It started out very promisingly and then decended into the worst cliches of the fantasy YA genre.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Well, I haven't read much YA, so I don't really know much about that, but I was mostly happy it was avoiding the worst cliches of the vampire romance genre.

[isweedan]

OOh, I remember these! I read the books because of beautiful fanart I saw posted years ago on elfwood. I think the novels were originally published before people wrote or marketed things specifically to be YA and they got retroactively sorted into the class.

I think the third book ended really sadly, but I have no hate for it.