Reading Angel review

Description: Fourteen-year-old Angel wakes up one morning at her desert trailer home to discover her mother has been murdered by a lowlife named Scotty, who has vanished. Angel has no water, no weapon, but she knows that Scotty, an expert tracker and hunter, will surface soon in order to eliminate her as a witness. She has to run, to disappear, if she is to survive and tell the world what happened. Her flight takes her through a harsh landscape to places she never expected to be, forcing her to trust others for the first time and strengthening her in ways she doesn’t even anticipate . . . until it’s time to take a stand.

My thoughts: Throughout this book I was reminded of those kinds of stories that are usually in movies where a guy acts like he’s nice and then once he gets the girl he changes. Then the girl has to learn how to stand up for herself because for some reason the police can’t help. She ends up beating him to death so then it’s like: woo hoo for feminism or whatever. Despite this story being repetitive, I actually like these kinds of movies (particularly J. Lo’s Enough), so it was interesting to see a book that seemed similar to these movies.

Of course it isn’t exactly the same. This guy never acted like he was nice, and he went after the main character only after he killed her mother. But she does have to run, because this guy is literally hunting her down. Fortunately, since she’s only fourteen, she is helped out by a couple of families who can see that something is wrong. Unfortunately, this guy goes after these families too in anyway possible without causing enough problems to give the police enough evidence to arrest him (or at least keep him in jail).

Her interaction with these people who want to help her as she tries to end this “hunt” evokes situations that cause Angel to have to deal with issues she’s been running away from her whole life. She has to learn that she isn’t her mother just because she does things that remind her of her mom. And she simultaneously has to learn to trust herself while also learning to let people help her, which is something she’s definitely not accustomed to.

This book is a quick read but packed a lot of emotion. Although the ending seemed a little tame and quick for everything that had led up to it, the book was still OK over all. And what made up for it just being OK was that it made me think. There were a lot of things in this book that made me feel so much sympathy for Angel. She’s only fourteen! And the sad thing is that people younger than that are getting abused, and that’s just a sad thing to admit.