One of the main characters in Cliff McNish’s YA novel, Angel is Stephanie Rice, the socially backward homeschooled daughter of strict parents who have not until recently allowed her to have friends or significantly interact with the outside world. Stephanie wears the wrong clothes to her new school, talks about the wrong subjects, and tries way too hard to make friends. If it sounds like a bad stereotype, it is, but Stephanie does have one thing that distinguishes her from all those other formerly homeschooled social disasters out there: she’s obsessed with angels.

Freya, the other main character in the book, is also an angel-addict, but she’s faced her mentally ill fascination with becoming an angel, overcome it, been healed and been released from the mental hospital. So Freya doesn’t believe in angels anymore. However, she keeps on seeing them, especially one dark angel who scares the heck out of her.

McNish’s angels are certainly not Biblical angels. The angels in this books are more like alien beings from another part of the universe, who, having compassion on poor humans on Earth, try to do what they can to alleviate human suffering. Unfortunately, these angels are limited beings, also limited in number, and with no access to a Living God. According to the book, some angels believe in God and others don’t, just like humans in that respect. So, the angels in Angel aren’t really angels at all, not messengers of God, not beings created by a loving God to praise and worship Him, not “holy ones” set apart to the service of God. Author Cliff McNish just uses the word “angel” and then makes up his own fantastical beings who have very little in common with the angels in the Bible. I wish he had called them almost anything else, maybe gods, although they’re beautiful but essentially impotent gods.

Another problem I had with the novel: the human characters behave rather oddly, even the ones who are supposed to be sane. A father leaves his daughter alone in the house for two days just as he is considering committing her to a mental institution because he believes she’s relapsed into mental illness. Huh?
A mom locks her erratically behaving daughter in a bedroom and then leaves to pick up her husband, the girl’s dad, from work, leaving the girl locked up with the makings of a bonfire in the room. Huh?
A teacher allows a discussion in which most of the class is ganging up on and tormenting a new student in her classroom to go on for a very long time. Why?
Such anomalies abound.

Then, there are sentences like this one: “Freya was just using that as an excuse to keep him with her and talk to her.” (p. 310)

And this one: “An unaccountable need to defend herself was racing through her blood.” Adrenaline?

I found Angel absorbing in some ways, but unsatisfying in the end. I kept hoping that some of the characterization issues would be resolved, that the peculiarities of the the characters’ behaviors would turn out to have rational explanations. But they didn’t. Only New Age, irrational explanations that were ultimately unconvincing.

Not my cup of tea, but thanks to Lerner for sending me a review copy.