By Shannon McKenna
Round Table editor

“Sometimes beautiful things come into our lives out of nowhere. We can’t always understand them, but we have to trust in them. I know you want to question everything, but sometimes it pays to just have a little faith.” – Fallen

Fallen, written by Lauren Kate, takes readers into a world where not only angels exist, but so do fallen angels, star-crossed lovers and a confused-by-love lead character who is reborn every 17 years to fall in love with the same man. The main character, Lucinda “Luce” Price, is not an angel and as far as anyone is concerned, she’s a defect.

In fact, Lucinda is spending her junior year of high school attending a “reform school” complete with video cameras monitoring students’ every move, barbed wire surrounding the campus, overgrown vegetation, a full Olympic-sized swimming pool inside a church and a military graveyard where students get to spend detention cleaning up old marble statues.

This dream school? It’s called Sword and Cross.

Luce is sent to the school after a serious accident has taken place with one of her best friends. Her parents no longer trust her and she is quite unsure of herself most of the time. However, one thing she is sure of is that when the shadows (black creatures that lurk around her constantly) come, she cannot control them and bad things tend to happen.

This book, while true to the Romeo and Juliet motif, has a much more complicated plot, which features a twist.  In addition, the other characters have their own personal stories, which are filled with hidden secrets that are revealed as the novel progresses deeper into the plot.

First, we have Daniel. Daniel is a mysterious, handsome, grey-eyed, rough-and-tough guy. He is an alluring character who clearly has some hidden secrets of his own.

Then we have Cam, who is charismatic, smooth-talking, and equally handsome, but also that character readers just love to hate. Cam is also the guy who is there to pick up the pieces after Luce first makes eye contact with Daniel…..and he flips her off.

As the introduction to the novel says, “Daniel wants nothing to do with Luce – going out of his way to make that painfully clear – but she just doesn’t seem to want to let it go.”  It would be easy enough to paint their relationship as cliché, especially as she is said to be “drawn to him like a moth to a flame,” but her motivation is runs deeper than that:  Luce is desperate to understand why she feels like she already knows him.

What makes Fallen different than many of the other contemporary teen romance novels? One, there are no vampires involved in the story.  Two, through Kate’s use of descriptive elements, the story becomes both ominous and beautiful.

Fallen leads readers to believe that Luce is just another typical damsel in distress, and while this is true for the most part, in the next two books in the series (Torment and Passion), Luce’s character evolves immensely, as does the plot.

While the book could easily be compared to Stephanie Meyer’s banal Twilight series, it deserves bit more credit than that. The themes, characters and problems in Fallen are all unique and darkly romantic. Fallen grows increasingly more complex as its plot thickens and draws the reader in.

The overall theme – the struggle between good and evil – is, of course, not so new; however, Fallen takes a different spin as the way the story is presented and the twists it provides are all original, aiding to a pleasurable gothic love story featuring a winning formula of fallen angels and forbidden love.