Audie the Angel and the Angel Army

EARLY YOUNG ADULT:  Cave has a crush on the most beautiful girl in his sixth-grade class. She’s perfect. Soon he finds out why. Audie is a phoenix angel, and they are swept up in an adventure to save Audie’s homeland. The younger angels are the only ones who can be trusted, and it is up to their small army of ten to keep evil at bay. Audie has to deal with discovering who she is, learning to fight and fly, and choosing between two young men who vie for her affections.

While the plot line of this story is basically solid and gives plenty of action to draw in young readers, there are so many issues with the writing that the story itself becomes lost. The story is told from the point of view of a narrator who is never really in any of the action. He is relaying information given to him by other characters at a later date. This keeps the reader at a distance and never allows any engagement since everything is told and hardly ever shown. There is never a strong point of view and the story often jumps around between the characters and is very confusing. Other issues including misused words, over-used punctuation, capitalizing complete sentences and other amateur mistakes drag down the flow of the book. Parents should also be warned that while the author is very creative in creating a fantasy land, the term “angel” is used loosely at best and with such rampant evil and several other issues, the land is a far cry from any acceptable type of “heaven”.

Stephenia McGee