Review: Rapture by Lauren Kate

Book: Rapture
Author: Lauren Kate
Series: Fallen
Publication Date: June 12th, 2012
Publisher: Delacorte Press
My rating: 2 Stars

The sky is dark with wings....

Like sand through an hourglass, time is running out for Luce and Daniel. To stop Lucifer from erasing the past, they must find the place where the angels fell to earth.

Dark forces are after them, and Daniel doesn’t know if he can do this — live only to lose Luce again and again. Yet together they face an epic battle that will end with lifeless bodies...and angel dust. Great sacrifices are made. Hearts are destroyed.

And suddenly Luce knows what must happen. For she was meant to be with someone other than Daniel. The curse they’ve borne has always and only been about her — and the love she cast aside. The choice she makes now is the only one that truly matters.

In the fight for Luce, who will win?

Rapture is the astonishing conclusion to the FALLEN series. Heaven can’t wait any longer.

Not quite as bad as I expected. I'm disappointed, though. Let me tell you why.

If you're given this awesome pitch about this love that transcends time and space, that has happened over and over again and fallen apart the same way, wouldn't you be interested? I know the sappy romantic me would be. I'd heard about Fallen and its bad ratings before I read it, but there was that doubt in my mind. How bad could it be? With a plot like that...

After I read the first and second books, I got my answer.

Really, REALLY bad.

It's just... I began these books expecting this beautiful love that would make me cry, that would make me hold onto Daniel and Luce and never want them to go and always want them together and want to buy some Superglue so I could just stick them together forever.

Instead, I got a useless wimp and an emasculated, chauvinistic (how oxymoronic!) idiot.

So you can see how I'd be disappointed.

I think this could contend with Romeo & Juliet over Most Tragic Love Story That Actually Sucks.

Now, let's bring ourselves away from the series and focus on Rapture specifically.

It was actually halfway decent. I was surprised that Kate managed to tie up the loose ends that she apparently couldn't do in the third book. The third book was basically mindless fluff. I loved the time traveling, but it was pointless and didn't do anything else except further give examples of Daniel's and Luce's baseless love.

Anyway, there is stuff that happens. Angels die and there's this huge climactic moment (which isn't that climactic, really. We were all expecting it), and also a couple "big" reveals. You might be surprised, you might not. Kate has really amped up the description. I mean, she's never been that bad at it, but I really noticed it in this book. I actually quite enjoyed it, except for the parts where it got all weepy and melodramatic. I never really liked Dee. She just seemed a bit too deux ex machina for my tastes, and her dialogue was really awkward. I guess she was supposed to be a wise old owl among the little winged birdies, but she just sounded like she was pulling shit out of her ass.

I guess where this book really fails is the characterization part. Luce is as useless as ever, and I found her general limp noodle-ness, as well as her whole caring about others as an obvious attempt to cull readers' sympathy, extremely grating on my nerves.

 

Daniel, of course, it as emasculated as ever. He doesn't do anything besides fluttering around and going "Shh" whenever Luce tries to ask a question. I just don't understand why it took so long for her to figure out the truth about herself. Sure, in her past lives, she wasn't allowed, but why couldn't she know in her human one? This self-awareness thing sounds really phony to me.

Lucifer is... I don't even. Kate manages to make him sound not like the lonely, complex figure from Paradise Lost, but rather a really arrogant and hateful teenage boy. He actually says things like "Baby, that's your Achilles' heel."

What kind of evil mastermind calls people "baby"?! Or maybe they do, but they sound really sleazy and laughable in the process.

So, there's Lucifer. Then there's God. Or should I say GodDESS.

That's right. God is a woman. Kate is really having fun with this, isn't she? First Gabbe, and now God, of all people.

Let me be honest. I don't think anyone should try to portray God in a book. I'm not Christian or religious or anything, but I just find it difficult to be able to use the right words to capture the inspiration of so many religions of the world. Most authors will mess it up, and that's what happened here. Maybe it was an attempt to buoy the feminists, or she was just trying to twist things a bit, but it did nothing, especially since God didn't seem that frightening or like someone who created the universe. It just... didn't make sense. Also, there were these fluctuations in capitalization. Like sometimes God would be called You, then other times just "she" or "you." So the religious/angelology/demonology part of this book is still called into question. I guess my gif doesn't have much oomph now, if God is really the person who's portrayed in this book.

The ending was blah. It's been done before. If you've read Reincarnation by Suzanne Weyn, you'd know what I'm talking about. Astonishing conclusion my ass. I care about Cam, too. What the hell happened to him? At least he had some spice to him. He appeared approximately two times before being overshadowed by Daniel again.

Ugh, Daniel. You ruin everything.

Anyhow. This series is finally over. Hopefully, Kate has learned some things.

Also, I think it would've been really funny if Luce's roommate Nora was Nora Grey from Hush, Hush. They could've shared all their issues with overprotective boyfriends and dysfunctional lives and cried together.

YAY FALLEN IS OVER LET'S ALL REJOICE.

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