Dan Brown, Angels & Demons Review

Good Points
If you liked the Da Vinci Code, you'll like this book. It's fast, furious, and without a complicated story. It's a fast, easy read that engages you quickly all the way until the very end. As well, the Illuminati anagrams are beautifully drawn, and are truly the redeeming aspect of this novel.

Bad Points
A horrible point of Angels and Demons is the character development. Our main hero, Robert Langdon, a professor at Harvard, is thrust into a James Bond-esque mission with plot twists. He fights off assassins and solves ingenius puzzles... and lives through it all. But that's not all Brown adds to the mix. Our leading lady, Vittoria Vetra, has her adoptive father murdered by an assassin. Not two days later, Langdon and her are tossing cheesy lines in a bedroom... this would NEVER happen in reality! Dan Brown, with his prefaces and forwards in which he states that "some of the elements of this novel are based on true events" fails to grasp one important thing: human psychology.

Another negative aspect of this novel are the constant plot twists. Granted, a plot twist makes a novel more enjoyable, but when attempting to write a fast-paced novel, nineteen plot twists are not needed! At one point, the reader becomes so confused at who's doing what that the book simply becomes a chore to read.

Finally, and overall, I would put Dan Brown's complete lack of writing skills and the single worst point of this novel. As in the Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown writes as though for a third grade audience. In such, Brown chose to write for the age group that he is capable of writing for a little more in Angels and Demons, unlike his attempt at intelligence in Da Vinci Code. All the same, there are many points in the novel where Brown gets carried away by his sudden rise to popularity and tries to cause some controversy... to further plummet the quality of his text.

General Comments
There are many aspects I would like to point out of Angels and Demons that I found to be yet another example of Dan Brown's abyssmal writing style:



1. You do NOT make your characters stop off at the wrong church and spend 3 chapters at the location before moving on! In a fast-paced action novel, this adds nothing to the story or the excitement... it is simply a waste of paper and time.



2. If your father was murdered, you would not be completely fine with it two days later. Perhaps (and even this is stretching it) you would engage on a quest for revenge, as did Vittoria, but her character seems to forget by the end of the novel all her woes, while having sex with Langdon.



There are many more points that I could make about Angels and Demons, but I still recommend that everyone read the novel anyways. As long as you don't analyse it or look too closely for plot holes or author idiocy, Angels and Demons is a very exciting read. It is everything that you could want in a no-brainer novel: action, suspense, murder, women, deception, and assassins. It's when you consider it an intelligent novel when it begins to lose its credibility...