Nalini Singh’s Angels’ Blood, the first book in her Guild Hunter series, is one hell of a trip. By which I mean, it’s dated as hell, it’s weird af, and I kinda loved everything bananas minute of it.
Angels’ Blood was originally published in 2009, and in many ways it really feels like a 2009 book. I haven’t run into the word “exotic” so much in years, my guys. And there’s a reason for that! It’s a fucked-up word with fucked-up connotations! You can read lots more about it from Sable Yong here at Teen Vogue, among a great many others.
The word “exotic” was probably the biggest issue I had with Angels’ Blood, and I lay there in bed thinking about the tells of the era, and about Singh herself, and realized that, yeah, it’s definitely a tell of the era in which it was written. But I do want to be on the record as pointing out that “exotic” ain’t it, and never really was. (For that matter, there is also some fat-shamey stuff at the beginning—but it didn’t last all that long, and my God but exotic really got under my skin.)
In the Guild Hunter books, Singh creates a wild mythos all her own. There are angels here, and they are fuckin’ assholes (which, yes, I love). There are vamps, created by angels themselves, and the vampires are a strange mix of victim and enabler and potential killer. (They’re definitely danger bangs, as Fated Mates would call them.) Our heroine, Elena Deveraux, is “a born hunter, not a trained one”—someone born with the ability to track vampires down by scent. It’s a useful skill…and enables her to track down an angel gone very, very bad.
It might not seem like that much of a set-up, but Singh uses it to her advantage in every way possible. She inserts humor into situations where it wouldn’t seem possible. She gives Elena a tragic backstory (nothing like a fucked-up family!), and, in addition to her tough-girl exterior, layers in vulnerabilities and surprising compassion—for everything from her own horrible family to the very creatures she is tasked with hunting down. Nearly every character here is painted in shades of gray, from the archangel Raphael to the angel Elena calls “Bluebell” and the fellow hunters who form Elena’s found family. Not a one of them is anything close to perfect, and it makes them much better as characters—and much more compelling.
Angels’ Blood is a wild ride, filled with action, seduction, and violence. It is a compelling ride as well, drawing me in as fast as I could turn the pages. I’ll come back to it again, even as I know I’ll grit my teeth at all those exotic beauties. Because all the characters are super strong badasses and also complete assholes, and my god, I dig it.
Essentially a Nerd 