Being caught between the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other sounds like a problem with an obvious solution: Listen to the angel. Ignore the demon. Congratulations, you still have your soul.
But who do you listen to when both the angel and the demon are super hot?
Adalyn Grace takes the age-old dilemma literally in “The Wretched Divine,” her adult fantasy debut, which finds Aurelie Chantelune caught between an angel and a demon — and desperate to kiss both. Her kingdom, Rhovar, is trapped in a losing war between the biblical beings, but its fortunes are looking up: She’s destined to bond with an angel who will help protect her people. But when someone she loves transforms into the very creature she has sworn to destroy, she also bonds with Severin, a demon who claims he can reverse the process. Soon, Aurelie, Severin, and Aurelie’s bonded angel, Yuriel, are entangled in this ancient war, with the line between angels and demons looking much less clear than Aurelie was taught.
I’ll give Grace this: She knows how to sell a premise. Knights! Angels! Demons! Magical bonds! Centuries of celestial warfare! Biblical chaos! Someone forced to work with their enemy, potentially discovering that the “good” guys aren’t so good and that the “bad” guys might actually not be so bad! It makes sense, then, that I found myself quickly falling into the story.
But I found myself asking a question far more important than which biblical hottie Aurelie should choose, and that’s: Who the hell *is* she?
After 500-plus pages, I still can’t give you a good answer.
Aurelie is introduced as a disciplined, hardened knight whose identity has been forged through years of religious devotion, family loss and obligation, and a passionate hatred of demons. Instead, the Aurelie who actually appears is reckless, impulsive, easily manipulated, shallowly motivated, and seemingly incapable of considering the consequences of her actions until they’ve punched her in the face.
Nowhere is Aurelie more frustrating than her relationship with Severin. Her mother and brother were killed by demons; she has been training to kill them her whole life; and her beliefs have supposedly left precious little room for any sort of ambiguity. Then she meets one smoking-hot demon, and her hatred immediately turns into attraction. It’s never clear exactly how Aurelie got from a lifetime of “demons bad, angels good” to trusting a demon without the kind of reckoning that should go along with a seismic shift in her worldview. An impulsive heroine can work. A morally compromised heroine can work. A naive heroine can work. But an impulsive, morally compromised, naive heroine whom the narrative insists is principled, capable, and devout is a problem.
The rest of the cast doesn’t exactly help matters. Severin has some entertaining moments, but he’s more caricature than character — Sexy Demon No. 47: snarky, seductive, winged, dangerous, and contractually obligated to turn every conversation into an opportunity for innuendo. Lute is mostly just… there, despite her potential for something much more interesting. The crown princess, Ilaria, has the makings of a far more interesting character as someone who questions the moral dogma behind the war and advocates for peace with demons even as her father plans to marry her off for wartime military support. But Grace leaves another promising character frustratingly underdeveloped.
Yuriel, meanwhile, is the book’s most convincing exploration of the very ideas Grace seems to want to tackle. His history, obedience, guilt, and growing doubts about the angels give him something the others desperately need: an internal conflict that actually feels internal. Through him, there’s a genuinely fascinating story here about religion, inherited hatred, institutional power, and the difference between being good and being obedient. If everyone else had been as well developed as he is, this would be a very different review.
The pacing proved almost as inconsistent as the characters; I’d tear through chapters one day only to leave the book untouched for the next three. The opening charges out of the gate; then, the story gets bogged down by a quest that never justifies its length, and the momentum evaporates. The stakes are supposedly enormous, but the urgency comes and goes depending on whether Grace wants to throw in another sexy encounter. Throughout, some twists are so heavily telegraphed that I was willing to put money on the fact that I was right. By the book’s end — a place I’m not sure I’d have reached if I wasn’t finishing an ARC — I was spending more time interrogating the plot than enjoying it.
I did finish, though, and I think I’m happy that I did. In the final quarter, Grace remembers she has an epic religious war on her hands and unleashes an avalanche of betrayals, revelations, and upheaval. Most of what happens is genuinely interesting, especially the implications for the larger conflict. But cramming so much into the final stretch made me wonder just why the previous hundreds of pages accomplished so little.
I haven’t completely written off this series. The final revelations leave the kingdom, its religious institutions, the alliances, and the holy(ish) war in a very different place than where we found them, and there are possibilities here I’d like to see explored. Grace has a terrific imagination, an appealing mythology, and the foundations of a story with something interesting to say about the stories we tell ourselves to distinguish heroes from monsters. I just wish she’d spent as much time figuring out what her characters believed as she did figuring out how badly they wanted to sleep with each other.
Maybe the answer to the whole hot-angel-or-hot-devil predicament is to ignore them both and trust your judgment. Unfortunately, Aurelie’s moral compass seems to have come without a needle. Good luck navigating a centuries-old holy war with that.
Thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan/Feiwel for providing me with an e-ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.
