The Fallen is a novel written by author Thomas E. Sniegoski. It follows the life of main character Aaron whose life changes on the day of his 18th birthday–for the worse. He gets sucked into the middle of a battle between fallen and holy angels. Strange things start happening, one by one: hearing strange voices when no one’s around, suddenly understanding foreign languages, bringing his dog back from the dead, and countless confrontations with angels looking to draw Aaron to their side.

Reading the description on the back cover, I was so excited to see that there were more books in the series. I thought I’d finally found a new series to obsess over. The first few chapters, I was very much intrigued. Until I realized I wasn’t even fully reading them anymore. I was skimming through the story to read the dialogue and not spending more than two minutes on a page. Part of the problem was more of a personal preference. The novel is in third person, an automatic “no” for me. I was easily confused as to which character was speaking when there wasn’t any dialogue. Another thing that threw me off as I read was the sudden introduction of about six new characters. This was in a single chapter, and I hadn’t even gotten to chapter 5 yet. I had to stop reading at this point. I was confused; there were too many characters to keep track of, and I was completely lost. However, I thought I would try reading it from the beginning another time. I tried to keep reading it about three times and was unsuccessful each time. I just couldn’t get back into it. I do think the story line is very original and interesting. Before I got hit with six new characters in the span of two pages, I was enjoying the plot immensely.

Overall, the only problem that I had with the novel was the sudden amount of characters that were so abruptly introduced.  I will recommend this novel to those who enjoy fiction about supernatural creatures and magic. In total the novel is 517 pages of captivating adventure; it just wasn’t for me.