Saturday, June 26, 2010

Book Review - "The Empire of Angels"

"The Empire of Angels" by Bernard Werber
My grade: D

I have to begin by saying I read this book in Russian, as there was no English translation available in all the places I looked. Now I understand why. This book is, in one word, shallow. It introduces a bunch of potentially interesting ideas, along with a whole slew of useless ones, but doesn't develop, in any sense of the word, a single one through. Some relatively-loaded opinions he casually mentions without expanding on them at all, begging the question: why bring it up at all? To simply put your opinions out there, in the form of a disconnected novel, is not really enough to either convey any sort of message nor to convince anybody of it.

Certain moments in this book are, dare I say it, ridiculously cheesy. For example, Marilyn Monroe is one of these angels, for no apparent reason whatsoever. On top of that, at some point in the novel, the angels are fighting with the lost souls in limbo in a "Care Bear Stare" sort of way. If you have every watched Care Bears, you will know what I'm talking about; the angels send really great messages of love and all things nice to overcome the 'evil' coming from the lost souls. Unless this book was written for 5-year-olds, it's hard to believe that the author actually expected to accomplish anything with it.

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