Fallen: Lauren Kate

Bestseller aside, I really liked this book. For how thick it was, I finished reading it fairly fast. At any rate, it was easy to see what made Fallen so popular because of one reason:

New Twist on an Old Idea 

Kate could have easily made her main character a sweet and innocent girl that just-so-happens to draw the attention of the fallen angel, but she didn’t do that (thank goodness!). Instead, her main character is about one more mishap away from being institutionalized (prison, mental hospital … it’s really up in the air).

A second point is that Kate designed her book to be just as much of a mystery as it is a paranormal romance. This helped propel the plot and gave the reader something to chew over once obsessed ruminations of the love interest got old.

Here’s how Kate did it:

1. The main character, Luce, was involved in a mysterious death.

2. Luce is then sent to a reform school full of mysteriously weird kids.

3. Luce finds herself, once again, involved in another mysterious death.
4. Death seems to follow once Luce starts to unravel the truth, pieces of it anyway, behind the kids at the school.

Ironically enough, I’m also writing a paranormal romance (hey, who isn’t?) and I think Fallen was one of the best books so far to show me how to bring a fresh perspective to the market. Kate not only had the romance element, but there was the seriously flawed main character, the mystery, the love triangle, etc. It added a lot of depth to her story compared to other paranormal romance out there and will be, at least for me, something that I’m going to add in my own fledgling manuscript.