Summary: When the mysterious nine-year-old Norah knocks on widow Margaret Quinn's door in the middle of a cold, snowy night, Margaret accepts her into her house without a second thought. Margaret is still grieving over the loss of her daughter Erica, who ten years previously ran away with her boyfriend, intent on joining the revolutionary group Angels of Destruction. Norah quietly steps into the center of Margaret's grief, and takes on the role of Margaret's granddaughter - a link to the daughter she believes is gone forever. But while it's clear that Norah is no ordinary child, it's less clear who - or what - she really is, what her purpose is, and how - or even if - she's connected to the missing Erica.

Review: Angels of Destruction, as a book, feels quite a lot like its main character, Norah: mysterious, slightly ethereal, and filled with an air of sadness and loneliness, but still shot through with hope. The writing, too, is all of those things; even apart from the story they're telling, Donohue somehow manages to fill the words themselves with a sense of loneliness and longing. At the end, I'm not sure that I've entirely wrapped my head around the message and moral of the story, and there are some issues of plotting that I had problems with, but the writing itself was powerful; mesmerizing and haunting enough that after I finished I had to get up and take a walk for an hour just to ground myself again. This is a book to be read on a cold and blustery November evening, or maybe a gray and slushy February day, not a sunny June afternoon.

My reaction to Angels of Destruction is more or less the same as my response to Donohue's first book, The Stolen Child. The plotting was somewhat strange, some characters (particularly Paul, Margaret's husband/Erica's father) were underdeveloped, and enough threads were left unresolved and ambiguous to keep it from being a truly satisfying read. However, for years after finishing The Stolen Child, I would find myself thinking about it at odd moments, and Angels of Destruction feels like it's going to linger in my head, taunting me with its mysteries and open-ended theologies for years to come. 3.5 out of 5 stars.

Recommendation: Hard to say. It's an interesting story, and gorgeously written, but not exactly an easy or fun read. I think it will probably be enjoyed the most by readers of literary fiction who don't mind a fair bit of magical realism and a number of ambiguous story elements. ( )

Donohue captures the somber pace of real emotion very well. It seems as though he's tried to place this book more firmly in the real world than Stolen Child, though, and by doing so actually makes it feel less real than that book with clearer fantasy elements. ( )

There was a different world in 1970’s America. Plenty of average, run of the mill teenagers were growing their hair long, doing drugs, preaching peace, while some joined underground organizations bent on revolution and world salvation, their ears ringing from the reports of Vietnam and civil rights. The world, it has been said, was never to be the same, despite older generations’ desperate attempts to preserve life as they knew it.

Margaret Quinn had a quiet, rural Pennsylvania life; structured, simple, and average. Simple, that is, until her daughter Erica runs off with her boyfriend, Wiley, to travel across the country to join the underground movement of the Angels of Destruction whose goal it was to destroy the known world and recreate it in their vision. Erica disappeared without a trace, and left to her own devices Margaret slowly loses her composure and her grip on life.

Ten years later, the appearance of a ragged orphan on her doorstep one freezing cold night brings a new sense of purpose to Margaret’s life. But is this child, newly renamed Norah Quinn and passed off as Erica’s daughter, sent to live with her grandmother while her parents mended their relationship, an answer to Norah’s prayers? Readers follow a trail of mystery and tragedy throughout this work, all the while seeking answers to the same questions that plague the characters: Who is Norah Quinn? Where did she really come from? What has become of Erica during the past ten years? Is it possible that Angels walk among us, guiding our path through life and helping to atone for our sins?

The imagery and style of this book is beautiful. Paragraphs worth of descriptive material are so vivid and filled with wonderful comparisons that it is hard to remember one is reading a novel. The characters, as in any great work, appear so well crafted that it wouldn’t have been surprising to see them appear from the pages and walk about on their own accord. The story itself is fresh, creative, and portrayed extremely well. Divided into three sections, readers get a wonderful blend of back story and new action, and the story benefits greatly from this.

It’s hard to find much to fault in this book, and the only improvement I could even think to suggest would be that some conclusions were a little too loose for my liking. Two pivotal characters disappear fairly abruptly and without much explanation. The rest of the story is so well written that it’s easy to accept these instances as part of the natural fabric of the tale. However, Angels of Destruction is such a complex tale that I needed a day to digest what I had read, which gave me time to realize that I felt pieces of the puzzle were missing. It’s a bit unsettling to come to that conclusion, and I wonder if maybe that wasn’t the point Donohue was trying to make. If it’s possible for anyone to understand the puzzling sense of loss Margaret Quinn experienced without losing a child under such circumstances themselves, perhaps these loose ends accomplish such a feat.

Original Posting of this Review can be found on my blog: http://betweenpages.wordpress.com ( )

This mysterious and mesmerizing triptych of a novel opens with widowed Margaret Quinn opening her door and finding a child, half-frozen, shivering on her doorstep. She takes this orphaned waif in, dubbing her Norah assuming that the tattered and torn piece of paper pinned to her coat is the start of her name. As Margaret makes this orphaned child comfortable and warm, she is thrown back into her memories of her own daughter, Erica, as a child. Erica had run away from home ten years before to join a radical group called the Angels of Destruction. Norah's presence, which Margaret explains away by saying that the child is her granddaughter come to live with her while her parents work out their difficulties, starts to heal the wounds in Margaret's heart. Norah also befriends an emotionally hurt, young, local boy named Sean, whose father has abandonned his mother and him. Sean knows the secret that Norah is not really Margaret's granddaughter but conspires with Margaret to keep this hidden from the rest of the town, and even from Margaret's own sister. What neither Margaret or Sean know is what Norah really is or from where she's arrived. Sean sees her perform small miracles or impossibilities and starts to believe Norah's assertion that she is an angel, and assertion that will cause the unravelling of everything.

The second portion of the book moves back into the past, into Erica's adolescence. Margaret's husband Paul and Erica butt heads in more ways than just as typical father and teenaged daughter, growing more and more estranged and contemptuous of each other as Erica falls even harder for the boyfriend her father so disdains. Boyfriend Wiley is very obviously a loose cannon, even before he convinces Erica to run away with him and travel cross-country to join the revolutionary group Angels of Destruction. But Erica takes off anyway, escaping the father she thinks completely hypocritical and the mother she barely considers but whose heart she breaks. Much of the second part of the book details Erica and Wiley's flight to the West, including a long and unplanned stopover in the Tennessee mountains when Erica is ill and they are taken in by a grandmother and her otherwordly granddaughter Una, who bears a remarkable resemblence to the Norah who will appear 10 years later at Margaret's door.

The third part of the book moves back to Margaret and Norah together, beautifully tying the threads of the first two narratives together as the novel's inevitable denouement plays out. There is an elegaic feel to the writing in this novel and Donohue skillfully keeps from answering the reader's questions about Norah and her reality. Is she an angel sent to thaw Margaret's frozen heart and help heal Sean or is she a mentally unbalanced little girl or is she exactly who she claimed at the start of the novel, an orphaned child who appeared out of nowhere and beckoned by the light in the Quinn house? In this novel of damaged characters and rejected love, there are no easy and simple answers. The ending is both a surprise and not a surprise, striking in its inevitability. Despite knowing there will be no answers, there is almost a compulsion to keep reading, to come to the end, to know the little that we will be granted. This is quite simply an obsessive and ensnaring novel. ( )

In Keith Donohue’s Angels of Destruction, a nine year old girl, Norah, shows up on the doorstep of lonely widow, Margaret Quinn. Margaret is still mourning the loss of her own daughter who had run away ten years earlier to join a revolutionary cult. Margaret decides to tell a few lies in order to keep Norah, who seems to have nowhere else to go. The story also delves a bit into the past and follows Margaret’s teenage daughter, Erica, as she planned her escape from home and then found trouble, which prevented her from ever returning. The story hovers between reality and magic, humans and the angels they sometimes summon in times of extreme sorrow.

The story was well-written, but I must admit that at times my attention waned. I felt no great attraction to the characters of either Norah or Margaret, although Norah’s classmate Sean drew me in. I found the parts about Erica to be the most engaging sections of the book. I could empathize with her character & the dilemma she found herself in. I understand that the most important message of the book involves angels and faith. Frankly, I wasn’t particularly moved by that, which doesn’t necessarily indicate a flaw in the writing. I am probably not the intended audience for this book. ( )