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lanx-reads · 5 years

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Heaven Review

Final Rating: */***** or 1/10

The angel Bethany and her mortal love, Xavier, have already pushed the boundaries of Heaven with their relationship. In this conclusion to the Halo trilogy, the two take their love to the next, forbidden, step: They marry.

At a time when they believe nothing will come between them again, they are faced with their most daunting challenge yet: the Sevens, a military order of angels designed to maintain balance in the universe. These soldiers won't stop until their job is done - capture the wayward angel and send her home.

Secrets, exile, and unexpected allies flavor the rest of this intense love story and adventure.

Beth discovers there is only one way back to earth, but the cost is higher than she - and readers - ever imagined. If she can survive, she can prove to Heaven and Earth that there is nothing stronger than the power of love.

Heaven by Alexandra Adornetto is the Spider-Man 3 of all books and that is probably the highest praise I can give it considering I did enjoy Spider-Man 3.

I can’t believe I finally finished this fucking trilogy and HOLY SHIT this book was. A ride. A wild wild ride. I cannot put into words how utterly stupid, bad, and unintentionally hilarious and entertaining this book is. Drama after drama unfolds, none of it really sticks or is really connected to... anything. There’s actually quite a bit of action, but since the main characters are so hateable and nothing connects to anything it feels almost like some sort of terrible action movie. But I understand... books are hard to write and how do you write a good conclusion for a terrible series?

Well, you don’t.

Now, is this book more hilarious and entertaining than Hades? In some ways... yes. Yes it is. However, unlike Hades, which was just hilarious throughout for the most part, this book does have some incredibly boring and just painfully stupid parts that remind me of the entirety of the first book.

Heaven goes out of its way to cram even more religion down your throat. It tries to be even more offensive than the previous books combined. The author tries so so so hard to make these bland characters get on soapboxes as much as she can so they can spew utter nonsense about everything in general. This book is homophobic:

“Marriage is an indissoluble covenant between man and woman” -Gabriel

(Yes the above is a direct quote)

It’s also transphobic:

“Billie?” “No way, she’ll be gender confused.”

(They’re discussing baby names. So I guess if you’re a (cis) girl and named... Billie or Riley you’re gender confused according to this author. As if that’s how it works at all)

Aaaaand like the last book, the only PoC character is a black angel who’s the main villain. He’s also the only actual attractive character in this mess as well. I guess it’s good she... finally gave her meager PoC character an actual ethnicity? Hemiel is described as being black while Asia, from the last book, is just dark-skinned and ambiguously PoC. Of course, this is a double-whammy here... only Hemiel’s race is described throughout the entire book. And he’s the leader of the group of antagonists. Of course. Instead of just writing in PoC as people or just not touching the matter and allowing people to imagine the characters however they wished, all the PoC characters in this series (which amounts to two...) are honed in on and specified having a darker skin tone.

I also feel as if this book is offensive to like... every normal Christian out there? Like the Christianity in this book is Evangelical and just. Makes it sound like the whole religion is full of lunatics.

Like I can’t find any way this book isn’t offensive. It’s offensive to Christians and people of other faith. It’s offensive to LGBT+ people. It’s offensive toward PoC. It’s offensive toward domestic abuse survivors. It’s offensive to neurodivergent people. It’s offensive toward Southerners who think people down here are... like that. It’s offensive to both women and men as well. Like, this book holds no punches in it’s freezing cold takes and wrongness.

However, despite all of the above, I could not be bothered to be offended at all during this book. Now, I am an utter goblin and fall under many of the categories above, and I can understand why someone may get offended by this book. But I myself did not get offended. For one, it’s obvious the author is trying to be as “edgy” as she can be with the above. Why else would she go out of her way to preach every few pages, after all?

And it really does feel like she, the author, is preaching her beliefs to us during these moments. The shallow “story” grinds to a halt almost every time the characters get on their soapbox for anywhere between a few paragraphs to a few pages.

Rather than give an actual review about the entire book... I’m just gonna. Explain the plot. Because honestly everything I said about the last two books carried over. Actually, arguably, even though this book had more action than Hades, it is a technically worse book. I found several spelling and grammar mistakes, the pacing was atrocious... although better than the first book, none of the events were connected in any way and had no significance on one another. They didn’t really build up to any conclusion, relevant character development, or form any sort of detailed plot.

However, that being said, this book does have a plot. A thin one that makes little sense and goes everywhere and one where the subplots aren’t even tied up at the end, but one nonetheless.

Spoilers abound if anyone actually cares!!

In Heaven, Beth and Xavier decide to get marry. Even tho Beth recognizes signs around town that means hey this might not be a good idea she ignores these signs since she’s an incredibly selfish dunce. The priest who marries them is murdered for committing the sin of marrying an angel and a human together (?) and now Beth and Xavier are on the run from a group of angels known as “The Seven” who act as police. Due to God being Too Busy with Godly Things, The Seven go completely out of wack and become utterly obsessed with returning order... which means breaking their marriage I guess.

Of course, the above sounds stupid and makes little sense. There is no real reason on WHY angels and humans can’t marry. Like the previous books, there wasn’t any real reason why they couldn’t date either. It’s unexplained. Furthermore, that murdered priest? Yeah, Beth says it’s not her or Xavier’s fault since “they didn’t know they would be punished” yet... time and time again they were told that even dating was forbidden and barely tolerated AND on top of that she was warned with numerous signs that marrying may be a bad idea... so no she’s an idiot and it IS her fault. And honestly? Reading about an angel coming to terms with being the cause of death for someone innocent would have been interesting... but that would require Beth taking responsibility for her actions and stop being a selfish and whiny bitch... which is impossible.

After that her and Xavier go on “the run” which isn’t even on the run. They hang out in a cabin for a couple of chapters and whine about how they can’t fuck and how bored they are even tho, you know, it’s their own faults for getting into this mess at all. So much weight is put on marriage and I just... don’t get it. I am someone who doesn’t really want to marry anyone and if I did, it would only be for the benefits. I really don’t care about marriage at all, personally, so I just don’t get why it’s such a big deal here. I get it’s part of the religion... but still. Now, if the concept of marriage was explored in any significant way, that would’ve been interesting to read. But it’s not, so let’s move on.

After being caught by the Seven after doing Stupid Shit, they go to college because...? Sevens rely on their smell and with so many humans around it will mask it? Yeah, lame and contrived excuse to force the characters to go to college.

The college section of this book is one of the most boring and pointless. It consists of Beth hating on other girls, girls only talking about sororities and boys, and feels like a scene taken from a cheesy movie. It’s completely and utterly unrealistic and cringy; completely painful to read. Here, Beth and Xavier pretend to be siblings... which is disgusting considering this is where they decide to fuck in the woods (which is written SO BADLY I can’t even. Like... for real bitch starts waxing poetic about how she feels she’s in an underwater magical world while getting dirt and grass up her ass I don’t get it) anyways they pretend to be siblings while alone they are husband and wife and it’s so... gross... like you KNOW it’s not incest since they aren’t ACTUALLY related but STILL it makes me feel dirty to read. (And also makes me question if the author has an incest kink bc I mean really....)

Anyways, ofc they’re eventually caught by Beth’s roommate? Who fell in love w Xavier bc the need for drama demanded it and ofc she is disgusted. To hide themselves, Beth grows s k i n over her mouth and then f o r c e f u l l y wipes her memories... and again, claims she is still moral and good doing so since her “hand was forced”

Now, is this an interesting moral dilemma that could be explored? Of course it is! And because it is, it’s not explored at all, the book assumes Beth is in the right and the reader agrees, and moves on like nothing bad happened. No lasting consequences happen due to this.

Speaking of... Beth’s character is so radically changed she feels OOC. It’s like the author wanted to have character development but not do any of the actual work at all. She acts like the baddest bitch around and complains that she’s world weary from “all the trauma she’s been through” but it comes out of nowhere? Like she’s still whiny and selfish and annoying. She still acts like a little girl and that the whole world owes her. She ain’t a badass and I dunno why the book is trying to convince us she is.

Anyways, after THAT fiasco MORE drama hits the fan as the Sevens find them due to them Being Stupid and also Fucking In The Woods and stage what is basically a poor and tasteless terrorist attack in the lecture hall. Now, I do wanna note Heaven is a book that is several years old now... and the author is Australian, but that’s no excuse for the piss-poor mismanagement of a terrorist attack shown in a college campus.

Now, that being said, this terrorist attack is by the Sevens, who manipulated memories to make it seem like this is what it was... I think... it is very unclear. Someone even dies during this... actually two people... heh

Either way, Hemiel is introduced, he’s shown to be a Horrible Angel with No Empathy and the students ofc freak out and hide under their desks while the room is trashed as they try and root out Xavier and Beth. Hemiel is trying to separate them by either dragging Beth back to Heaven or killing Xavier... and they do manage to succeed this time around!

YES, XAVIER DIES

Well, kinda. I was SO SHOOK when this happened I got EXCITED like could you imagine if Xavier died and the rest of the book is Beth hunting his soul down in Heaven while also looking at her own relationships and exploring the concept of death for a universe that has shown us death is not the end? Yeah, that doesn’t happen ofc but it would’ve been cool.

Anyways, Xavier sadly doesn’t stay dead. Beth’s sister, Ivy, brings him back even THO SHE SAYS SHE CAN’T she does so anyways because ??? plot armor. But it was fun reading about him being dead. That being said, more problematic stuff pops out here, ofc. Beth threatens to kill herself if she can’t be with Xavier which is just.. not even gonna touch that with a 10-foot pole, honestly. Because yikes.

Anyways, after pages of the author deciding to take the pussy way out, Xavier comes back except he’s not alone in his body.... because you see...

dun dun DUN Lucifer is back! And he has possessed Xavier! To get... revenge on them killing Jake Thorn, his son!

I think this is the part of the book where the author realized SOMETHING from the last book needed to carry over to make this an actual trilogy? So on top of having Sevens and Not-In-The-Know College campus girls as the antagonists, we also need to throw Lucifer onto the mix. And he isn’t even the LAST antagonist to be introduced to this book!

This is why I call it the Spider-Man 3 of books, people. There are at least 4-5 different villains in this book and it is ridiculous. This is also why none of the events feel connected. There’s too many antagonists and honestly? You could cut out this entire portion with Lucifer out and nothing would change. It’s just a page-waster.

That being said, this entire section was the most hilarious and fun to me. I enjoyed Lucifer a LOT in the last book and here he doesn’t disappoint! He calls Beth a whiny bitch to her face which is honestly... a wholeass mood so yeah.

Beth, Gabriel, and Ivy tie down Lucifer to a bed in a basement of a house they so happen to own which is kinky I guess and a standoff kinda happens? Lucifer is too strong of a demon for the angels to exorcise since they’ve been weakened fighting Sevens or something and Lucifer wants to stay in Xavier’s body to take revenge on him and the angels.

Which... okay. See, this starts turning stupid as then Gabriel and Lucifer start waxing poetic and debating about... the morality of Lucifer’s fall from Grace? I just... more bible shit... whyyy and it could have been interesting if we cared about Gabriel or if Lucifer was a real character rather than just “big bad” but blehh. Jake Thorn makes a return as a wraith briefly to develop a deal between Beth and Lucifer to get Lucifer out of Xavier’s body or something and it’s honestly so pointless. This entire scene is pointless. There’s so many plotholes it’s painful.

And thing is, if the author kept the big bad of the series to just Lucifer, this right here is a great starter to a different book. But for some reason, she changes villains every book. Fuck, she changes the villains in this book every few goddamn chapters! This is why nothing feels concrete in this book and why nothing sticks, nothing feels important, and events have no weight. This book feels serialized. Like a monster-of-the-week sort of story that encapsulates multiple episodes of some tepid and poor Supernatural ripoff. And I never even watched Supernatural.

After this event, everything goes downhill fast. Mainly ‘cause this is the last time we see Lucifer. He just kinda leaves after this section, doesn’t come back, and is barely thought of. The only reason why this entire section of this book is here is because Lucifer agrees to leave Xavier’s body if Gabriel’s wings are cut off? Thing is, his wings aren’t even cut off, they’re just badly damaged. But if you needed Gabriel’s wings to be destroyed for Plot Reasons... just have the Seven’s damage them? Like why drag an entire random ass character and this entire random ass scene into it?

See? Nothing makes any gd sense! The author just wanted to write this scene ‘cause she wanted to... not because it would make sense to put in. And Xavier barely has any trauma from the fact he was possessed by the greatest evil of the world. He watches a game of football, has sex with his wife, and is pretty much completely fine after that. Yikes. That’s not how... people work? At all?

Anyways, Gabriel getting his wings damaged means he’s now Emotional TM since idk pee is stored in the wings? Actually, an angel’s version of a soul and he then confesses his love for Molly, Beth’s friend from hs who is now in an abusive relationship w the head of a growing cult. I WISH I WAS JOKING

Like. What was the author SMOKING when she came UP with this stuff. Anywyas, all that happens is more waxing poetic about love and Gabriel acting OOC and then soapboxing about Christianity and cults or something. Then Later they all rescue Molly from her initiation into the cult by her fiance and since she’s separated from him, she can have no trauma now because she was rescued!! Ain’t that just GREAT!! And now she can be with Gabriel!! Silly Molly, for even FALLING for a cultist anyways!! Yeah, this point of the book just.... whyyyy what is the pooooint whyyy does the author need to put in her two cents about DOMESTIC ABUSE!! NO ONE ASKED!! NO ONE. Maybe because people complained Beth and Xavier’s relationship was shitty and had abusive traits so she had to put in a more dramatic abusive relationship to show that there’s isn’t? But Molly being in an abusive relationship with a cultist doesn’t... magically mean Beth and Xavier’s unnatural obsession w one another is healthy. You don’t-can’t- compare abuse. Or at least you shouldn’t. It’s not a fucking pissing game.

Anyways, after that fiasco, which again has no real trauma or emotional impact on... anyone? They go back to Venus Cove after being caught AGAIN by Sevens at the college campus. Xavier is revealed that he’s... part Angel? Because Ivy blessed his mother to give birth to him and he was destined to cross paths with Beth or some shit? It’s all convoluted and stupid, honestly. There is no point to this besides giving Xavier a magical way to combat the Sevens in a scene because silly Beth is a womyan and she can’t defend herself and her HUSBAND against ANGELS of course not!! She needs a man to help her!! Also... I guess for more drama? I don’t know I’m just perplexed at this point.

They go back to Venus Cove because ?? Beth and Xavier are finally cornered and Beth is forced to go back to Heaven. She’s put with a therapist called Eve. More grossness about therapy and misinformation about mental institutions is inbound. Eve is the last of the villains introduced and it doesn’t even matter. Beth can’t stand Heaven without Xavier and goes to get help from Emily, Xavier’s dead gf who he lost his virginity to which is info We Didn’t Need or Care About. Her and Beth argue some, Beth is a bitch, but she’s like that to everyone in the book so whatever. She meets with a friend who was once a Seven who introduces her to some RANDOM ANGEL who HAPPENS to run an UNDERGROUND REBELLION against the Sevens that cuts wings off of angels who want to be human?

And this doesn’t go against God because ??? I have NO Idea because the author doesn’t want it to and God already knows about them and is ok w it and the political unrest in Heaven I guess? God the contradictions are piling up. THIS MAKES NO SENSE AND COULD BE A BOOK ON ITS OWN

Also why were we wasting time with Beth in the first book when there was ALL THIS happening on in the BACKGROUND apparently?? I don’t know nothing makes any sense.

Anyways, her wings are cut off, she says goodbye to Heaven and falls, lands on the beach of Venus Cove. Her old friends walk by talking about exposition in the 2 years she’s been gone but doesn’t see her somehow? I guess this exposition is supposed to tie in subplots but it doesn’t and also doesn’t matter.

Beth goes back to Xavier, they have a reunion, and are alone now in the house since Ivy and Gabriel aren’t even there they went off somewhere to do Things I guess and it doesn’t matter. She’s human now and has a belly button and everything so now they can grow old and die together the end.

If it isn’t clear by now.... this book has a problem with basically everything. From a technical standpoint it’s an utter nightmare. In some ways, even worse than Halo since this book also has a tone and mood problem. The story jumps ALL OVER THE PLACE and does a poor job at mixing the supernatural parts and the human parts together. Revelations are made that have no bearing on anyone or anything. Drama happens and so do traumatic events but no one is really impacted by... anything? Beth is always in the right even if she does terrible things, poor her and Xavier, their life as rich white people is so hard since their love isn’t accepted or recognized by Heaven :( let me play the world’s smallest violin for them.

Seriously. No self awareness or critique. At all.

I don’t know what else to say about this book. I think it should be evident in everything ELSE I’ve said. Writing? Bad. Plot? What plot? Bad anyways. Characters? Godawful. Too many. No direction, no pace, nothing. This book feels like a churned out mess probably because it is. I don’t even wanna ASK how this got published because the answer is simple; money.

Either way, I am BLESSED to be done with this series. As hilarious as Hades and Heaven are, I wanna go back to reading REAL books, thank you very much.

Also, I am so sorry Spider-Man 3. I am so so sorry for comparing you to Heaven. That is a straight up insult and I take it back right now. Because I don’t think anything is comparable to Heaven.

*/***** or 1/10

#Heaven #book review #bad book review #Heaven Alexandra Adornetto #bookblr #Alexandra Adornetto

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avanneman · 7 years

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Baby Driver: Jon Hamm doesn’t know Shakespeare

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Actually, that should read “Edgar Wright, writer/director of Baby Driver, doesn’t know Shakespeare”, but Big Jon said it in the picture, and who knows Edgar Wright, amirite? But it’s all Edgar’s fault that poor Jon (aka "Buddy") is stuck with the line “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo?” when it should be “Romeo! Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo?” And, therefore, entirely inappropriate for the scene, in which Hamm is seeking to find, and murder, “Romeo”, aka “Baby Driver”, in a parking garage.

It’s inappropriate because, of course, Juliet is not asking “Where are you, Romeo?” No, she’s asking “Why is your name Romeo?” though what she really means is “Why did you have to be a Montague, instead of the scion of some noble family that my family (the Capulets) is not feuding with? Then I could marry you! For what’s in a name?”

Okay, that does require a little unpacking, not to mention some actual knowledge of the play, which, clearly, exceeds Eddie’s grasp.1

So, if you hadn’t already guessed, I’m not a fan of Baby Driver, despite its 98% “Smash” (“Smash” as in “good”) rating from Rotten Tomatoes, which, I guess, is not infallible. Baby Driver is itself a mannered, misbegotten smash of Bonnie & Clyde, about which I’ve raved, Pulp Fiction, and Blue Velvet, neither of which I thought were worth a pixel.

I went to Baby Driver expecting/hoping for some shallow, bad-ass, R-rated summer entertainment, and the film started off well, with “Baby Driver” (Ansel Elgort) as this sweet, silent bad-ass “driver”, a pretty boy version of Michael J. Pollard’s semi-autistic yet good-natured and ever efficient C. W. Moss. A whole film dedicated to a modern-day C. W! Sounds like fun!2

And so it was for the first fifteen or twenty minutes, Baby rockin’ out on his iPod to some golden oldies while waiting for the grown-ups to finish with their bank-robbin’. Grown-ups, well, they don’t always do things right, so that sirens are wailing even before Baby can pop the clutch3, but that ain’t no matter. We’re in for some serious, serious rubber burnin', without the sense of moral and aesthetic shame that inevitably comes from watching a Vin Diesel movie.4

But after that great beginning, the film starts going sideways. Seems Baby only does his driving because he’s in hock to suavely evil crime lord Kevin Spacey, who may as well be sleep walking for all the nuance he brings to the part. Even worse, Baby takes his hard-earned cash home to his deaf black foster dad Joseph (CJ Jones), who, fortunately, is not Morgan Freeman, though he’s so nobly suffering he may as well be. Baby signs with Joe, and anybody who watches movies knows that anyone who can sign and speak is part angel.

Yeah, this is kitsch on top of kitsch—as a matter of fact, it’s superkitsch—but why stop now? Only sissies quit when they’re ahead. Baby’s creative too! He records what people say, adds some percussion and riffs and turns it all into a sort of “found art”, kind of like an aural Joseph Cornell!

Of course, this idyll has to be busted, though it’s hardly Baby’s fault. He meets this really sweet chick (Lily James as “Deborah”), a chick as sweet as he is, and if you guessed she’d be a waitress, well, you guessed right. Yeah, it’s young love, true love, like a fifties Chevrolet ad come to life, if you know what one of those was.

Oh, and I forgot to tell you, Baby still owes Kev “one more job.” Yes, one more job! You have to hit those clichés on the head, boy! Otherwise, they’ll get away from you!

The gang for the last job includes the seriously bad ass “Bats” (Jamie Foxx), an obviously slumming Jon Hamm,5 and his crazy bitch wife “Darling” (Eiza González), a hundred and seven pounds of implausible, gum-poppin’ malevolence. So what could go wrong?

Well, everything, of course. But the twists, the double crosses, and the blow outs just don’t have the bang of the first fifteen minutes. We’re deep in Quentin Tarantino land, with repetitive outbursts of unlikely, mannered violence—though, to be fair, Wright entirely lacks Tarantino’s compulsive sadism, and I mean that entirely as a compliment.

But the real killer for me is not Wright’s stylized violence (Elza blazing away with an Uzi in either hand, for example, which would pretty much guarantee that she couldn’t hit anything),6 but his pathetic sentimentality. Very much unlike Tarantino or David Lynch, Wright lacks the nerve to kill off a single sympathetic character. The Baby/Debbie lovey-dovey dialogue is so syrupy that you half wonder if Debbie is setting him up—if the film is setting you up. Is Debbie going to take Baby’s cash and blow his head off as a final twist? Nope. She waits five years for him to get sprung from the federal pen so they can ride off into the sunset together. What a letdown!

Afterwords Like Tarantino, Wright is seriously into retro cultural references—music, films, etc. That’s because a director’s “world” is limited to old movies. They can’t make contemporary cultural references because no one’s made a movie about that yet. The most egregious occurs when crime boss Spacey tells the gang to pick up some “Michael Myers Halloween masks” for the heist, leading to some confusion. Did he mean “masks of the character Michael Myers in the 1978 Jamie Lee Curtis classic Halloween” or “masks of Michael “Austin Powers” Myers for Halloween”? If you thought that was funny, you probably call Mom’s basement “home”.

It's "arguable", I guess, that it's supposed to be Buddy's error—that he's a Philistine as well as a murderer—but that strikes me as a stretch. The "correct" reading of Juliet's line was the subject of a Peanuts cartoon sometime near the close of the last millennium. ↩︎

Michael J. Pollard—“the homuncular, elfin, inexplicably popular” Michael J. Pollard, in Leonard Maltin’s bizarrely uncharitable characterization—worked that CW thang to the hilt, “playing virtually the same offbeat, imbecilic character” throughout his career, to Maltin’s further dismay. Jesus, Leo! Did you never get laid? ↩︎

Baby’s almost surely not working a stick, but idioms can’t always keep up with the technology. ↩︎

Still, one has to feel sorry for Vin, having to share “his” franchise with “the Rock”—because it was so successful! ↩︎

It seems very likely that Hamm will simply never get past Don Draper. When you hear that voice, you know the guy is suite smart, not street smart. You’re elegant, Jon, you’re elegant. Just accept it, and get on with your life. ↩︎

The mêlée gets so intense that one of the lenses of Baby's shades pops out, in ridiculous homage to the bit in Godard's über classic À bout de souffle, already too cutely reprised in Bonnie & Clyde. Once was too much! Twice is ridiculous! ↩︎

#Baby Driver #edgar wright #movies

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