Squee

Archangel’s Eternity

This isn’t a review. If it were, it would be a paragraph long:

This book reads like a very long conclusion which would be boring and meaningless to someone who hasn’t read the series at all. Those who have devoured the series like I have will likely be as ecstatic and thankful as I am. And those who have enjoyed at least some of this series will likely also find a lot of catharsis and pleasure in this series finale.

That’s it. That would be the review. Impossible to grade too. As a standalone book, it’s probably a C. But as the conclusion of a series twenty years in the making, it’s an easy A.

So I’m not writing a review: I’m writing a love letter to this series. I reflected on the series a while back in this piece I wrote for Squee from the Keeper Shelf.

In many ways, this final book is a love letter to readers of the series, and even romance readers more broadly. In it, we find out the fate of every important character we met in the preceding seventeen books. Their fates are not wrapped up with a speedy ‘and they lived happily ever after’ or a similar blanket statement letting us know that all is fine. Oh, no. Each character’s fate is plotted out for us so carefully and thoroughly.

When we pick up a romance novel there is a trust that comes with that label. You may be faced with difficulties and obstacles and heartbreak in this book but in the end, everything will work out for the best. So we put our trust in authors that they’ll honour that promise. We trust them with our most vulnerable parts, immersing ourselves in their stories, knowing that in the end our hearts will be kept safe. This is precisely what Nalini Singh does in Archangel’s Eternity. She holds our hands, pulls back the veil that usually hides the promised happy future and lets us revel in the magnificent lives these much loved characters get to live.

I adored reading this book. For all the hours and hours I’ve spent reading and rereading this series, heart in my throat as Raphael and Elena face terrible peril, I now have this book in which endless love and good fortune prevail. I’m so glad I chose to trust Nalini Singh with my fragile heart. It was a trust delivered on and I have been amply rewarded with a book that lifted my spirits.

– Lara

A thousand years.
It’s been a millennium since Elena’s fateful first meeting with Archangel Raphael. She has survived war and loss, experienced beauty and cruelty. But no matter what, she has always held on to her mortal heart, as she and Raphael have held on to each other. Passionate and vibrant, they’ve built a life that has stood the test of time, growing ever stronger with each turn of the sun.
But change is coming—of a magnitude they could have never imagined—and it will forever alter the trajectory of their existence.
Even as they grapple with the cataclysmic shift in their personal lives, the Cadre of Ten, which has maintained a hard-won peace for centuries, begins to simmer with dangerous fault lines. The specter of madness looms in one archangel, the promise of war burns between two others, and in darkness far from mortal and immortal eyes stirs an ancient, slumbering power.
Suddenly, the future is terrifyingly uncertain . . . at the very moment that Elena and her archangel need to protect a treasure infinitely more precious than eternity.