YA

From the back of the book, with edits for spoilers:
Aeriel may’ve done something interesting in book one, but the Witch is far from defeated! Her evil vampyre sons continue to blight the lands, defeating even the warders created by the Old Ones to protect them. There is but a single hope for the Witch’s defeat—solving an ancient, mysterious riddle.

So, Aeriel sets off to solve the riddle, sailing across a sea of dust and straight into the worst of the Witch’s terrors. But if Aeriel is to save the world, she will have to overcome the Witch’s darkangel sons and ultimately confront their terrifying mother face-to-face.

Review:
My enjoyment of this book was stymied by a few annoying things right off the bat. First, in the first book in this series, there wasn’t any mention of people with weird-colored skin. I’d swear, although I don’t have the first book to consult, that Aeriel was described as having a tan/rose complexion before the sun bleached her more fair. Now, they say she’s white, but it’s clear she was once mauve. And there’s all these blue and green skinned people and stuff.

Secondly, there’s the revisiting of scenes from book one and suddenly including some conversation that we never saw before, or a tidbit like, “Oh yeah, she gave those things names.” It makes it seem like the author wasn’t planning ahead. I would’ve preferred to have seen those conversations within the context of the scenes as they were taking place, then one could reflect back later and go ‘Ahh, I see’. I know this is YA, but c’mon. J. K. Rowling does it just fine!

Thirdly, after a bit of an angsty beginning, Aeriel goes off alone. This part is so dull, just a description of the landscape she’s passing through. At least the concept of time was more clearly portrayed this time.

It took me ages just to get to page 100. After this point, however, she gets some companions and the story picks up and its enjoyment value greatly improves. The annoying elements were primarily confined to the beginning of the book, and I eventually managed to stop being irked about the skin color thing. I read from page 100 to the end (333) in a day.

The overall plot is pretty predictable. I mean, obviously, she’s gathering gargoyles from the title, but their significance is incredibly obvious. It’s a little much to believe that while Aeriel acquires them she is ignorant of this. Still, I look forward to seeing more of certain characters in book three, and now that I’m two-thirds through the series it’d just be dumb to drop it now.

From the back cover:
Aeriel is kidnapped by the Darkangel, swept up into his dozen black wings and carried to his distant keep. There she is to serve his brides—thirteen pitiful creatures who were once beautiful, before the Darkangel drained away their souls. Aeriel would free them, but now that she, too, is one of the Darkangel’s captives, she can do no other than obey—even while she knows she must destroy him.

For when he has found his final bride, he will come fully into his sinister powers. Aeriel must kill him first, even though deep within him is a spark of goodness that makes her love him—a spark that could redeem even his evil.

Review:
I realize now that I never actually read the back of the book before starting this. It sure makes Aeriel seem kind of… flighty. Oopsie, got kidnapped, now I take orders and swoon over Mr. Tall, Winged, and Evil. This really does her a disservice.

The beginning of the book was good and moved quickly, though in the middle section things dragged a little bit for me. Thankfully, the action picked up again at the end and events moved swiftly on to their conclusion. There were a few plot elements that were sort of obvious to me, but which might not have been so for a YA reader. They were resolved satisfactorily for the most part, though perhaps with a little too much convenient magic at hand. One further quibble is that I never really got a handle on the terms used for the passage of time, so I could never be quite sure how long things were taking, which was pretty annoying.

I’ve got the other two in the trilogy courtesy of my local library, so will be launching into them forthwith. I’ll have to think of my own description for the next one, because the back of it is super spoilery for The Darkangel.