Out of the Blue Book Review
Out of the Blue by Sophie Cameron
From Goodreads: Sometimes, I imagine alternate endings to the story: last-minute miracles, touches of magic. I picture how things might have gone, if I wasn’t there. If I’d left just a few minutes later. If I hadn’t been alone. It doesn’t make any difference. One way or another, the crash always comes.
Ten days after Jaya Mackenzie’s mum dies, angels start falling from the sky. Smashing down to earth at extraordinary speeds, wings bent, faces contorted, not a single one has survived.
Hysteria mounting with every Being that drops, Jaya’s father uproots the family to Edinburgh intent on catching one alive. But Jaya can’t stand this obsession and, struggling to make sense of her mother’s sudden death and her own role on that fateful day, she’s determined to stay out of it.
When her best friend disappears and her father’s mania spirals, things hit rock bottom and it’s at that moment something extraordinary happens: An angel lands right at Jaya’s feet, and it’s alive. Finally she is forced to acknowledge just how significant these celestial beings are.
I got this book in the Book Box Club Fallen Angels box, so thanks Libby and Kate for this one.
Going into it, I felt a little trepidation. I heard only mediocre reviews of Out of the Blue, and wasn’t sure if it would be my kind of thing. From experience, I don’t have a great track record with angels in YA. Apart from the Shadowhunters series, I’ve DNF’d the Hush, Hush series and the House of Night series. It’s not my cup of tea. But I decided to try the theme and the book just in case.
Out of the Blue was… okay. The characters were all interesting, and I liked the diversity of them all too. There’s an LGBT romance in there that was very sweet, and I enjoyed seeing Cameron deal with a character with cystic fibrosis too. She handles the difficult topics with ease, which was refreshing. It fell a bit short when it came to Jaya’s family though– her sister is annoying, and not at all believable as an eleven year old, given all the angel info she spouts all the time. The father is also irritating, and I found it difficult to see anything redeeming in what he’s doing. Yeah, grief clearly plays a significant role, and I can see why he acts the way he does, but it just made me angry. I don’t see how Jaya could have coped with it for so long the way that she did.
The other issue I had with this novel is the way grief is dealt with. In some ways, it is woven through the narrative excellently, with some really interesting and devastating insights into how Jaya sees the world without her mother in it. Obviously, grief is a very individual thing, and people act differently, but it was still riveting to see how Jaya felt about it, and how the world around her handled the whole fallen angel phenomena. It raises questions about religion and the afterlife for obvious reasons, and it did make me curious to see how people thought about that in the book. Unfortunately, I felt a little disappointed in the whole link to Jaya’s mum’s death. It came across as heavy-handed to me, and I really didn’t like how the novel ended. It seemed very rushed. I also don’t really know why the book is listed as a series, since I can’t imagine where it will go from there, unless it will be with a different set of characters or a different perspective on the events.
Overall, I’m giving Out of the Blue a 6.5/10. It was interesting, and I loved seeing some diversity in YA and how some of the grief was handled, but at times it was heavy-handed and a little cheesy.
You can order a copy online from Waterstones here, Amazon UK here, and Book Depository here.
