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Book Review of Archangel's Kiss (Guild Hunter, Bk 2)

Archangel's Kiss (Guild Hunter, Bk 2)
reviewed on + 77 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 2


This is the second book in the Guild Hunter Series, picking up the day after the ending of the first book. In it we follow Elena as she learns how to be an angel, including tricky things like actually learning to use her wings. Her learning gets accelerated when Lijuan, another archangel decides to throw a ball, supposedly in Elena's honor.

I'll admit, the plot to the book is pretty thin - there's two major lines, one being an angel that for some reason is killing and intimidating with the idea that this will help them become an archangel to replace the one killed in book two. Everyone seems to know this, but it was never explained to me fully why they would think that was how one becomes an archangel. The second line was the looming confrontation with Lijuan over her making "reborn" (zombies). However, while there was some investigation into the first story line and lots of fretting over the second, there wasn't really any plot progression.

Instead the book was filled with Elena in weapons training, Elena leaning angelic culture, Elena learning to fly, Elena having flashbacks to her childhood and Elena coaxing Raphael to start sleeping with her again. Raphael was rather annoying at the beginning of the book - filled with manly, "I can't sleep with you until your stronger because what I was will hurt you". Bleh. He was also rather off putting with his initial refusal to accept that Elena would have to be an equal in their relationship. However, this at least fit in with angels as they are portrayed in the series, and Elena wears him down over the course of the book, so that by the end he's much more reasonable. Basically, she's helping him become more human over the course of the book.

The flashback to Elena's childhood got annoying as well, as they happened some much. However, each time we got a bit further into the memories, so in the end it was alright. I wish we could have gotten more in each flashback and thus fewer flashbacks though.

The ending was a disappointment - both plot lines get tied up very neatly and very quickly with not nearly as much drama as the fretting and planning of the rest of the book warranted.

However, I didn't really realize most of this until after I finished reading the book and started thinking over what I had read. At the time I read the book I enjoyed most of what I was reading, which is why it gets two and a half stars - in spite of the flaws, I enjoyed reading it.