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    Angels of Destruction: A Novel
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    Angels of Destruction: A Novel
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    Angels of Destruction: A Novel
    Audiobook14 hours

    Angels of Destruction: A Novel

    Written by Keith Donohue

    Narrated by Cassandra Campbell

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Keith Donohue's first novel, The Stolen Child, was a national bestseller hailed as "captivating" (USA Today), "luminous and thrilling" (Washington Post), and "wonderful...So spare and unsentimental that it's impossible not to be moved (Newsweek. His new novel, Angels of Destruction, opens on a winter's night, when a young girl appears at the home of Mrs. Margaret Quinn, a widow who lives alone. A decade earlier, she had lost her only child, Erica, who fled with her high school sweetheart to join a radical student group known as the Angels of Destruction. Before Margaret answers the knock in the dark hours, she whispers a prayer and then makes her visitor welcome at the door.

    The girl, who claims to be nine years old and an orphan with no place to go, beguiles Margaret, offering some solace, some compensation, for the woman's loss. Together, they hatch a plan to pass her off as her newly found granddaughter, Norah Quinn, and enlist Sean Fallon, a classmate and heartbroken boy, to guide her into the school and town.

    Their conspiracy is vulnerable not only to those children and neighbors intrigued by Norah's mysterious and magical qualities but by a lone figure shadowing the girl who threatens to reveal the child's true identity and her purpose in Margaret's life. Who are these strangers really? And what is their connection to the past, the Angels, and the long-missing daughter?

    Angels of Destruction is an unforgettable story of hope and fear, heartache and redemption. The saga of the Quinn family unfolds against an America wracked by change. As it delicately dances on the line between the real and the imagined, this mesmerizing new novel confirms Keith Donohue's standing as one of our most inspiring and inventive novelists.


    From the Hardcover edition.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateMar 3, 2009
    ISBN9780739377208
    Unavailable
    Angels of Destruction: A Novel
    Author

    Keith Donohue

    Keith Donohue is the national bestselling author of the novels The Stolen Child, The Angels of Destruction, and Centuries of June. His work has been translated in two dozen languages, and his articles have appeared in The New York Times and The Washington Post, among other publications. A graduate of Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Donohue also holds a Ph.D. in English from The Catholic University of America. He lives in Wheaton, Maryland.

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    Reviews for Angels of Destruction

    3.5/5

    87 ratings13 reviews

    What did you think?

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 2/5
      Worum es geht:

      Eines Nachts klopft es an Margarets Tür: Ein kleines Mädchen Namens Norah steht davor. Margaret gibt sie kurzerhand als ihre Enkelin aus. Allerdings behauptet das Mädchen nicht nur, ein Engel zu sein, sie hat auch einen Verfolger.

      Meine Meinung:

      Öh, ja. Mir hat das Buch nicht gefallen. Zunächst mal war der Aufbau schlecht: Zuerst liest man über 150 Seiten von Margaret und Norah, in denen nichts geschehen, dann liest man ewig aus der Sicht der Tochter wie sie damals verschwunden ist. Dann ist man wieder bei Margaret und Norah. Ich hätte es schöner gefunden, wenn sich die Kapitel und Geschichten abgewechselt hätten. Aber so haben sich die Geschichten wie zwei Fremdkörper angefühlt. Und die ersten Kapitel waren ziemlich langweilig, was man mit dem Abwechseln hätte auflockern können.

      Die Geschichte hat mir auch nicht gefallen. Ein Teil ist unausgegoren, ein Teil wird nicht aufgeklärt, ein Teil ergibt keinen Sinn. Alles sehr seltsam. Dass quasi keine einzige Frage beantwortet wird ist das Schleifchen auf dem Scheißhaufen. Es war, als wüsste der Autor selber nicht, in welche Richtung er gehen will. Er versucht, subtil zu sein, und bekommt das nicht hin. Entweder drückt er einem Zeugs auf die Nase, oder er ist zu nuanciert, und als Leser versteht man gar nichts.

      Der Schreibstil an sich war gut… aber dann kommt ein Satz wie “Sie liebte es, mit seinem Schwanz zu spielen.” und zerstört das ganze wieder. Ansonsten waren die Worte so ziemlich das einzige, warum ich weiter las. Wenn das Buch eins war, dann flüssig.
    • 3/5
      I think that after this book, I might be satisfied with knowing that Keith Donohue is not an author for me. Like his first book, The Stolen Child, Angels of Destruction left me cold. It's technically well-written, but it didn't really do anything for me. I wasn't compelled to pick it up when I had some free time, and I was only too glad to put it down to go to bed. It went exactly where I expected it to go - nothing was surprising or touching, and I didn't feel anything for any of the characters. It wasn't bad by any means, which is why it gets three stars instead of two, but I don't think I will be revisiting the author.
    • 2/5
      Well written and unusual, but really not my thing at all.
    • 5/5
      I really enjoyed this book. Ostensibly it is about a mother whose daughter ran away with her boyfriend in high school. Her husband has passed away, and now she lives alone with the ache of loss. One night Norah appears at her doorstep. And with shared complicity, mother and 'granddaughter' forge a story to explain this sudden arrival.Norah is a lovely child, and special in many ways. She becomes best friends with Sean, someone else who is marred by the loss of his father.The angels of destruction themselves have multiple meanings in the book. I thought the book was lyrical, beautiful and bittersweet. I will definitely read more by the author.
    • 3/5
      This is the second novel from this author and again, fantastic writing. It is somewhat mystical and very relatatable to human emotion as well. The relationships you build with the characters make you feel you're living the story with them!
    • 4/5
      Angels of Destruction brought me back to a time when I read magical realism constantly. In the midst of a series of crazy snowstorms, a tale that draws heavily on the magic of cold and snow and angels was perfect! I loved the images drawn in this tale, and the ways in which the thought that angels live among us was made manifest in the story. I didn't want to put it down, and was sad when it ended. Beautiful, magical.
    • 2/5
      An okay book but definitely not as interesting as this author's first book The Stolen Child.
    • 5/5
      Wonderful writing. A small girl appears on the doorstep of Margaret McQuinn. Margaret's daughter ran away when she was in high school. Margaret tells everyone that the small girl is her granddaughter. The girl does magical things. Is she an angel? Also, the search for the runaway daughter begins. EXCELLENT!
    • 4/5
      Summary: When the mysterious nine-year-old Norah knocks on widow Margaret Quinn's door in the middle of a cold, snowy night, Margaret accepts her into her house without a second thought. Margaret is still grieving over the loss of her daughter Erica, who ten years previously ran away with her boyfriend, intent on joining the revolutionary group Angels of Destruction. Norah quietly steps into the center of Margaret's grief, and takes on the role of Margaret's granddaughter - a link to the daughter she believes is gone forever. But while it's clear that Norah is no ordinary child, it's less clear who - or what - she really is, what her purpose is, and how - or even if - she's connected to the missing Erica.Review: Angels of Destruction, as a book, feels quite a lot like its main character, Norah: mysterious, slightly ethereal, and filled with an air of sadness and loneliness, but still shot through with hope. The writing, too, is all of those things; even apart from the story they're telling, Donohue somehow manages to fill the words themselves with a sense of loneliness and longing. At the end, I'm not sure that I've entirely wrapped my head around the message and moral of the story, and there are some issues of plotting that I had problems with, but the writing itself was powerful; mesmerizing and haunting enough that after I finished I had to get up and take a walk for an hour just to ground myself again. This is a book to be read on a cold and blustery November evening, or maybe a gray and slushy February day, not a sunny June afternoon.My reaction to Angels of Destruction is more or less the same as my response to Donohue's first book, The Stolen Child. The plotting was somewhat strange, some characters (particularly Paul, Margaret's husband/Erica's father) were underdeveloped, and enough threads were left unresolved and ambiguous to keep it from being a truly satisfying read. However, for years after finishing The Stolen Child, I would find myself thinking about it at odd moments, and Angels of Destruction feels like it's going to linger in my head, taunting me with its mysteries and open-ended theologies for years to come. 3.5 out of 5 stars.Recommendation: Hard to say. It's an interesting story, and gorgeously written, but not exactly an easy or fun read. I think it will probably be enjoyed the most by readers of literary fiction who don't mind a fair bit of magical realism and a number of ambiguous story elements.
    • 3/5
      Donohue captures the somber pace of real emotion very well. It seems as though he's tried to place this book more firmly in the real world than Stolen Child, though, and by doing so actually makes it feel less real than that book with clearer fantasy elements.
    • 4/5
      This mysterious and mesmerizing triptych of a novel opens with widowed Margaret Quinn opening her door and finding a child, half-frozen, shivering on her doorstep. She takes this orphaned waif in, dubbing her Norah assuming that the tattered and torn piece of paper pinned to her coat is the start of her name. As Margaret makes this orphaned child comfortable and warm, she is thrown back into her memories of her own daughter, Erica, as a child. Erica had run away from home ten years before to join a radical group called the Angels of Destruction. Norah's presence, which Margaret explains away by saying that the child is her granddaughter come to live with her while her parents work out their difficulties, starts to heal the wounds in Margaret's heart. Norah also befriends an emotionally hurt, young, local boy named Sean, whose father has abandonned his mother and him. Sean knows the secret that Norah is not really Margaret's granddaughter but conspires with Margaret to keep this hidden from the rest of the town, and even from Margaret's own sister. What neither Margaret or Sean know is what Norah really is or from where she's arrived. Sean sees her perform small miracles or impossibilities and starts to believe Norah's assertion that she is an angel, and assertion that will cause the unravelling of everything.The second portion of the book moves back into the past, into Erica's adolescence. Margaret's husband Paul and Erica butt heads in more ways than just as typical father and teenaged daughter, growing more and more estranged and contemptuous of each other as Erica falls even harder for the boyfriend her father so disdains. Boyfriend Wiley is very obviously a loose cannon, even before he convinces Erica to run away with him and travel cross-country to join the revolutionary group Angels of Destruction. But Erica takes off anyway, escaping the father she thinks completely hypocritical and the mother she barely considers but whose heart she breaks. Much of the second part of the book details Erica and Wiley's flight to the West, including a long and unplanned stopover in the Tennessee mountains when Erica is ill and they are taken in by a grandmother and her otherwordly granddaughter Una, who bears a remarkable resemblence to the Norah who will appear 10 years later at Margaret's door.The third part of the book moves back to Margaret and Norah together, beautifully tying the threads of the first two narratives together as the novel's inevitable denouement plays out. There is an elegaic feel to the writing in this novel and Donohue skillfully keeps from answering the reader's questions about Norah and her reality. Is she an angel sent to thaw Margaret's frozen heart and help heal Sean or is she a mentally unbalanced little girl or is she exactly who she claimed at the start of the novel, an orphaned child who appeared out of nowhere and beckoned by the light in the Quinn house? In this novel of damaged characters and rejected love, there are no easy and simple answers. The ending is both a surprise and not a surprise, striking in its inevitability. Despite knowing there will be no answers, there is almost a compulsion to keep reading, to come to the end, to know the little that we will be granted. This is quite simply an obsessive and ensnaring novel.
    • 5/5
      I loved "The Stolen Child" so I was excited to find a new book! This is a truly fantastic book...it has moments of a religious bent, but it isn't a specific bent and it is embedded in a great story about two parents that lose a child and children that lose their parents and how they are affected and look for healing. It would seem, in the end, all one really needs to do is ask and believe. I loved the book. Please Keith, keep writing.
    • 5/5
      Ten years ago Margaret Quinn's 17-year old daughter, Erica, ran away with her boyfriend to join a revolutionary cult. These ten years have been hard on Margaret. She had Erica late in life and is now getting old, old beyond her years actually as she has become a shell of her former self, no longer having the company or sounds of her only child in her house and her husband passed away seven of those years ago. Now she just has her sister, who flies in and visits her every now and then, and the neighbour Mr. Delarosa who does the snow shovelling and other such heavy work for her. Otherwise she is a recluse whose only time out of the house is spent walking into the rural wilderness. She also spends much of her time praying that someday her daughter will return.Then one day in the middle of a storm, a little girl, Norah, 9 years old, knocks on her door and asks if she can stay. She's an orphan with nowhere to go she says. Margaret plans to contact the authorities the next day but instead by morning they have concocted a story whereby the girl is the daughter of her missing daughter and Margaret's own granddaughter who will be staying with her indefinitely. Margaret, Sean, a boy Norah has befriended, her class, and her teacher all become aware that there is something very special about Norah. Then comes the day that Norah announces that she is an angel.The book starts in the present of 1985, when Norah arrives at Margaret's doorstep, then goes back to 1975 to Erica's point of view as she runs away, then returns to 1985 and finishes off with a peek into the future of 2005. I absolutely adored this book. Exquisitely beautiful, the writing, the mood, the topic, the interaction of the characters, everything! All the characters in the book are Christian and though never outright stated as such, Catholic. The religious point of view in this book is absolutely beautiful and I wondered if I was reading Christian fiction at first but did realize that it is supposed to be Magical Realism with Christianity as the core of its "mysticism". This scene on page 67 set the tone of the book for me:"How do you do those tricks?" He edged to the foot of the bed. "Where did you learn that magic?""Not magic." Bending to her drawing, she scribbled furiously, the pencil a blur in her hands. "Miracles and wonders. All part of the plan."Uncertain whether to believe her or not ....."Don't mess around with matters of faith, amigo."A truly beautiful book with a page-turning plot as one wants to know what is going on. Is it all real or is it wishful thinking or is someone going a little crazy? Where does the truth start, and for that matter, where does it end? The imagery is simply beautiful and while I've talked of how the book affected me as a Christian I know that it is meant to be a mainstream book and that one with different beliefs will get a completely different message from the book and feel more of the magic in the "magical realism", than I did. The only reason my rating is not a full five points is that the ending is left ambiguous for some characters and I wish it had given us a finite ending for them but then I do see why the author ended it this way, so that we, the reader, can make up our own minds. But, I'm afraid I do prefer my endings to be written down in black in white, no guessing. I heartily recommend this book and I'll leave you with another quote that touched me."Atoms and angels, reason and faith," he went on. "one without the other is less than half as strong and can be a danger to our vitality. Reason is subject to the tests of logic and observable, demonstrable phenomena. Faith is tested by our desire and will. One cannot see faith, just as one cannot pour out hope or love from a beaker. Self-sacrifice and devotion escape the strongest microscope, but such qualities of spirit can be shown and known by us all, my dear. And so with God's messengers, more believed than seen, more felt than touched, our angels exist in open hearts, if we have but faith."