Small Angels by Lauren Owen

My first read of 2024 was Small Angels by Lauren Owen, and while it was enjoyable, I did have a couple of things that lowered the rating of this book significantly. Before we get into that, let me give a brief summary of the book:

Small Angels is a church that’s been owned by the same family for 200 years, bordering the outside of a forest that loves stories and brings them to life. Lucia Gonne is the youngest sister of this family, and she loved Mockbeggar as a child, even made friends with some of the stories it’s brought back to life.

Back then, Kate liked Lucia better than anyone, and she was fascinated with this forest, secretly exploring it with the four sisters and telling stories for the woods to hear. After a night that Kate can’t remember - doesn’t try to remember - one of the sisters died trying to kill the jealous ghost of Lucia’s friend, and the forest went still.

Now, Chloe is marrying Kate’s brother in the Gonne family’s church, and Kate is returning home for the wedding for the first time in years. With the forest silent for the last decade, no one expects there to be any danger: no one except Lucia Gonne, who’s been trying to kill the forest that’s come back to life.

Review

Characters

For the most part, while each character was easily identifiable and had different reactions and actions, they didn’t change too much throughout the story - at least, not in essence. There was a bit of character growth and development for each of the three main characters, but not enough that I would call it heavy development; Kate, Chloe, and Lucia are the same people now that they were at the beginning, I think.

Lucia probably has the most character development herself, but all of it happens off page. There are two timelines going on right now: Lucia, telling her story about growing up in Mockbeggar, and the three women in the present day, with Mockbeggar slowly coming back to life. In the first timeline, Lucia has a deep love for the woods and the ghost in them, and while we see the inciting incident for her change to hating the woods and trying to kill their ghost, we don’t see the actual change really happen.

Kate is another similar situation, where she used to love the woods and spent her whole days in them, and again, we know what the inciting incident for that change is, but in the present day, Kate doesn’t love them - she’s afraid of them, wants to avoid them so much that she doesn’t come home just to avoid them.

Chloe, the final main character, is the one who I would say probably changes the most of our characters during the main timeline of the story. At the beginning of the story, she’s looking forward to a normal wedding in a beautiful church, and she’s putting in the necessary work to clean it, and after the events of the story, although she’s been there through the whole story and it has changed her, I think she’s still mostly the same. We get the least amount of time with her at the end of the story, so I can’t say for sure, but I can imagine her going home and back to her life before she went to Small Angels, pushing that church to the back of her mind whenever she’s not in town.

Normally, this lack of on page development would be enough to make me not enjoy the book, but this story really was plot-centric, and in a way, I don’t think any amount of development in the characters would have changed what was going to happen; it felt inevitable, like something that would happen no matter what Lucia, Kate, and Chloe did. Without that inevitability, I don’t think I’d have enjoyed it much at all.

Plot

Speaking of the plot, I absolutely loved it. Dual timeline plots are really hard to do, and I think Owen probably did this better than most authors that I know. A lot of the time, I feel like the second timeline makes the details of the earlier timeline too apparent, and while I knew some information from early on - the death of Elphine, for example - I couldn’t have guessed the exact story that was going to happen, how Elphine was going to die, or what happened to Kate.

Like I mentioned before, it felt like this plot was also inevitable; I don’t think that the girls could have done anything to change the circumstances of what was happening. Chloe was probably the best bet, with the first time she went into the forest, but with knowledge of how the woods worked, it made perfect sense to me that Chloe couldn’t resist the things she did that caused the forest to wake up now, and once she’d done that, there was no going back.

Kate, from the beginning, seemed to have a feeling about the forest waking up, and by the time she got her brother to listen to her telling him that the church wasn’t safe, it was too late for them to cancel the wedding, and they were stuck.

I do think the story would have gone down entirely differently had Kate and Chloe not tried to run away after the wedding or, of course, if Lucia hadn’t come to ring the church bell, but at that point, I think too much of the story had passed with these characters experiencing the book rather than the other way around to say that this story was character driven.

I also didn’t mind the slower pace of this book; usually, I like a faster paced book, but I think if this book had been that, it would have ruined everything, and the tension would have been resolved before it really built up.

Ending (Spoiler!!!)

My biggest complaint about this book, though, is the ending. I was fully expecting a tense moment between Lucia and the ghost, maybe the ghost actively tried to kill her before she figured out what Elphine’s ghost meant with her advice, and she managed that before it was too late. And, I will say, in a way, that did happen, but there was so much downtime between her old friend trying to kill her and the resolution of it all that the tension ended up dissipating by the time all was said and done.

Rating

Overall, I’m giving this book three stars. The ending, while being somewhat disappointing, definitely didn’t ruin my experience with the entire book the way the ending of Wilderwomen did, but I think if it had been less disappointing, I probably would have rated it 4 stars because I really did enjoy pretty much everything about the book up to that point.