This book was April 2018's Sapphic Book Club read hosted by @sapphicliterature.



‘Hey baby, did it hurt when The Light carved you from stardust and burned wings of bone onto your back?’

*vague hand gestures*

So, we have Iofiel, an angel who joins a course meant for demons to help a friend, and thus ends up kinda stuck between the two sides that are meant to be enemies. We also have a shitton of angel lore, including sexuality and gender.

All angels are originally meant to be "triple A" -- asexual, aromantic and agender. Most of them seem to have a binary gender (although there were several nonbinary side characters, but none of them were super relevant) and that's all fine, but if they happen to be alloromantic and/or -sexual, then we have a problem, because that's a sin.

I originally found the concept of aroace being the default really interesting, even if it's only in the case of angels, but honestly, I was really uncomfortable with the way sexuality, romantic attraction, kissing, etc were all presented as sins to be avoided. I also feel like that a lot of the conversations/explaining about romance/gender/sexuality kept going in circles, and it was more frustrating to read than enlightening.

Regardless of this, I was fond of Iofiel and her little group - Archie and Maalik were both great, and Santiago and Damien were even more great. I also really, really loved a minor character, Lupe, and I enjoyed the portrayal of Lucifer as well.

That being said, something about the main plot (Apocalypse and all) really didn't work for me, and I kinda lost interest/track of what was happening towards the last 30%.

Kudos to the worldbuilding because I could see there was a lot of thought to it, but yeah, sometimes it was overwhelming or repetitive.

tldr; This was an okay book and I was fond of the characters, but I'm kind of "meh" on the way sexual and romantic orientation is treated, and I wasn't really into the main plot.

Representation:
- Iofiel is asexual, and maybe aromantic? she starts out with aroace being a default but then questions
- I think Archie is ace and/or aro as well, because he talks about not having interest in sex or understanding romance
- there are some minor nonbinary characters using they/them but I think only one of them really speaks more than once. that being said, all angels are /meant/ to be agender originally, so it's possibly more of them are nonbinary and just use different pronouns? Iofiel states she is a girl, though
- there is a recurring f/f side pairing that is relatively important ( )

This book is April's Sapphic Book Club read hosted by @sapphicliterature.

"Humans are good."
"I know that, Blue. We literally exist to serve them."
"Yeah, but..." Iofiel was all at once too overwhelmed to think. "I love them."

The beginning of this book got me invested instantly and I loooved how it ended but I struggled with the middle for about 20 days... ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Iofiel is an angel who befriends an imp and makes some unangelic decisions because of it. Also, there's The Apocalypse happening at some point.

What I liked:
★Iofiel - she's curious and energetic and her feelings are So Intense..
★at the beginning Maalik annoyed me a bit but this pink eyed crop-top loving boy grew on me...
★DAMIEN AND SANTIAGO - they were amazing both as a couple and as individuals: they had marvelous chemistry and I liked little things about them like Damien's love of poetry
★Damien and Santiago being basically a maried couple
★MORNINGSTAR - I know that he hates me along with all humans but every scene with him was enjoyable
★I'm cheering for demons in this one and it shows...
★LUPE!
★I liked that angels were supposed to be triple A by default (agender-asexual-aromantic) since their society is constructed differently
★this book is a meme factory and the dialogues were hilarious pretty often
★worldbuilding was great actually? I'm not big on angel stories but I liked this concept

What I didn't like:
⭐Iofiel? - some of her decisions started to annoy me.. I get that she started as a naive soul but for how long you can be like this... I feel like for some time she got too little development
⭐Archie - at times I felt that he was ok but I can't recall much of his personality besides being whiny?
⭐I felt like a lot of stuff were repeated again and again... Like, sometimes paragraphs contained the same info as the paragraph above and some things kept running in circles...
⭐most of Maalik/Iofiel? - I kinda liked them by the end but at the beginning I felt like they had a sibling dynamics and it was awkward for a while...
⭐for an agender-by-default society there weren’t much of agender angels that were central to the story
⭐it may be a meme factory but still some of the jokes fell flat... I hate when things try to be funny and end up opposite and I had some of those moments in here
⭐this Apocalypse thing took a while to unravel and with all the side angel/demon school stuff I feel like I didn't 'get' everything ( )