Falling Angels | 
 enlarge | Author: Tracy Chevalier
Creator: Anne Twomey
Publisher: HighBridge Company
Category: Book
List Price: $34.95
Buy New: $6.27
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Avg. Customer Rating:  146 reviews
Sales Rank: 1359933
Format: Audiobook
Media: Audio Cassette
Edition: Unabridged
Number Of Items: 6
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 5.7 x 4.5 x 2.1
ASIN: B0007YJ3WK
Publication Date: September 1, 2001
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
Set among the sweeping skirts and social upheavals of Edwardian London, Tracy Chevalier's Falling Angels is a meditation on change, loss, and recovery. Her central characters are two young girls of the same age, whose family plots are situated side-by-side in a cemetery modeled on Highgate. Lavinia Waterhouse is respectably middle-class, devoted, like her conventional, doting mother, to the right way to do things, although suspiciously well- schooled in subjects like funerary sculpture and the English practices of mourning. Her friend Maude Coleman comes from a slightly more privileged and free-thinking background. In contrast with Lavinia's mother, Maude's mother Kitty Coleman is well-educated by the standards of the day, and it has made her restless and irritable. But neither her reading, nor her gardening, nor her affair with the somber, high-thinking governor of the cemetery is enough for Kitty. She comes alive only when she discovers the women's suffrage movement, and her devotion to the cause takes her away from Maude in every sense. Although the point of view shifts between many characters (with even the Coleman's maid and cook getting their say, sometimes unnecessarily), Falling Angels is essentially the children's story, since it is their lives that are most open to change. The narrative spans exactly the years of Edward VII's reign, from the morning after his mother Queen Victoria's death in January 1901 to his own death in May 1910. Chevalier (Girl with a Pearl Earring) deftly uses the nation's dramatically different mourning for these two monarchs to signal the social transformations of the period. Readers at ease with English history will find Falling Angels an unusually subtle novel, with an emotional range that recalls the best of the Edwardian novelists, E.M. Forster, and his quintessential novel of Edwardian manners, Howard's End. --Regina Marler
Product Description
Time magazine crowned Girl With a Pearl Earring "a portrait of radiance...a jewel." In her New York Times bestselling follow-up, Tracy Chevalier once again paints a distant age with a rich and provocative palette of characters. Told through a variety of shifting perspectives- wives and husbands, friends and lovers, masters and their servants, and a gravedigger's son-Falling Angels follows the fortunes of two families in the emerging years of the twentieth century. Graced with the luminous imagery that distinguished Girl With a Pearl Earring, Falling Angels is another dazzling tour de force from this "master of voices" (The New York Times Book Review).
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| Customer Reviews: Read 141 more reviews...
Change and the Cemetery July 23, 2008
Two middle class British families, the Waterhouses and the Colemans, heretofore unknown to one another, have just erected monuments on their adjacent cemetery plots in London. One has chosen a stately urn; the other, a sentimental angel, described by the Coleman's daughter Maude in this way: "It hung above us, one foot forward, a hand pointing toward heaven. It was wearing a long robe with a square neck, and it had loose hair that flowed onto its wings. It was looking down, but no matter how hard I stared it did not seem to see me". (Page 4). The Colemans and the Waterhouses meet by chance, in the cemetery, on the day of Queen Victoria's death. Having daughters of the same age, they begin an uneasy acquaintance founded on their daughter's fond friendship. Their social differences are such that they might not have known one another otherwise.
Their life stories are told through the voices and vantage points of various members of both families, and others, including the maid. Each very short chapter has a different narrator, which can keep the reader's interest but at times is like riding on an unpaved road without shock absorbers. The reader is jostled about quite a bit. The constant thread in the narrative remains the cemetery, to which they repair from time to time at significant moments in their lives. As they do, the characters interact with one another and with the cemetery workers and manager, thus bringing into the mix people from entirely different walks of life.
The Colemans and Waterhouses change or resist change over the course of the book. One of the two families remains solidly Edwardian in spite of the vicissitudes that befall them. They cling to their comfortable world view, even though it becomes less and less relevant. All the while, the other undergoes a shift concurrent with the changes wrought by the emerging modern era. The cemetery theme can at times feel depressing and the subject matter, which includes dysfunction, neglect, and infidelity, is decidedly challenging.
Chevalier draws upon the suffragette movement in Britain to help bring new meaning to the life of one of the protagonists, with eventful results. That movement's colorful leader, Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst, makes a cameo appearance for verisimilitude's sake.
Chevalier is the author of the immensely popular and justly-acclaimed "Girl with a Pearl Earring". Just as that novel was based on a painting by Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer, one suspects that this novel was written with some ancient cemetery photographs in hand.
 Falling Angels June 8, 2008
This book is very easy to read, easy to follow and I found it enjoyable to read - would be nice if there was a sequel.
 What is the point of this book! February 19, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I thoroughly enjoyed Girl but this book left me asking "why?". It was depressing and a waste of time. It gave me bad dreams the night that I finished the book. Disfunction, neglect, infidelity, need I go on?
Excellent Victorian-era Fiction October 26, 2007
I love the way this book is written. Each chapter is from alternating characters' points of view (very much like Poisonwood Bible but not as tedious). The language is succinct but beautiful and quite descriptive of Victorian England, which I adore! I really could not put it down... Brava to Chevalier! The ending is VERY sad though. Be prepared. I wish I could give it 4 1/2 stars, but 4 will do.
Historical fiction that educates as well as entertains April 25, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The story of Maude Coleman, Lavinia Waterhouse and their families is told in the first person by each character involved so it reads very much like a diary. I like how the reader gets to see everyone's perspectives on a situation instead of hearing a story from just one angle. We hear the traditional and modern views of the time...in a changing world where the women's suffrage movement is getting more and more forceful leading (in this story) to the Hyde Park demonstration.
As someone who enjoys walking around old Victorian cemeteries it was lovely to have this one brought to life with the people who visited and worked there. I found the details of mourning etiquette during the Victorian period and the early 1900's fascinating: How long is acceptable to mourn, what to wear and what to do with it after the mourning period is over, and the views of the time on cremation and who should be buried where in the cemetery.
A sensitive and fascinating book.
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