★☆☆☆☆
(1 star)
I, as always, am nervous to write this review. I’ve long worried one day my blog would lead to me having my ribs removed in my sleep. Or worse, really hurting someone’s feelings. I love indie books. I love reading them and want to support indie authors. As always, I never go into a book looking to hate it, but I’ve had a lot of mixed luck with indie reads. I’ve turned to favouring known bad books, looking for those funny lines so I can write an easy, simple review.
When I face a book like this or Ascendent or even Flightless, I try to approach things differently than a mainstream book. I’m more lenient on a lot of things, because I get it: indie publishing is very hard. Editors are really expensive. I’ve been there.
Still, I am an honest person. It’s the autism: I can’t really lie. I prefer to be clear and honest, and well, I bought this book physically and it deserves a real review.
Soul of Lucifer: Lost is not a good book. I dislike having to admit to this, but it needs a lot of serious structural edits. The world and ideas are not critically flawed, and I see a lot of potential approximately to the left of the final book, maybe three inches.
Also, about a paragraph into writing this review, I rapidly became sick with COVID. I wanted to still write this, but I might be a bit rambling or off because of it, sorry. I’m so ill.
Plot
The plot of this book is a bit complex, but also quite simple. It involves a large number of characters and viewpoints, but the actual plot prograssion is almost entirely missed connections, misunderstandings, and information recaps. For a 400+ page book, it’s surprising how little actually happens that matters.
Oren is an angel who is a field agent on earth. She keeps being hunted down by a demon, Kai, who asks her to go to Hell with him- she refuses. One time this happens the confrontation goes badly, leading to her having temporary amnesia and losing a wing. This is the start of the book.
Oren was with her angel scout partner Liatiel, who was missing when Oren woke up. Oren takes Lia’s necklace with her. It turns out Lia is a rebellious angel who wants to lie low and be with her human boyfriend, and her necklace is magically able to hide the holder from Heaven.
Oren finds she cannot fly with one wing and prays to Heaven for someone to pick her up. No one does because, little does she realise, she has the necklace on her. Being apparently rejected from Heaven she falls into a despair and begins to glow, four sets of golden wings emerging from her back. A boy, Skylar, livestreams this online and takes her to his dorm.
Meanwhile in Heaven, angels Andrew and Elijah, close friends of Oren, worry about her being missing. A squad is sent to investigate her disappearance. The squad is attacked by a pair of demons Kai has sent to track Oren down again. The demons wipe the attacked squads memories, and via hazy recollection, the blame for the attack is put on Oren. She is now a fugitive.
Andrew is a guardian angel, which means he is raising three angel youths and training them. Since angels can be a variety of bloods- pure, human born, half- Heaven recently made a rule where angel kids were taken from parents and raised/trained in these trios. They do still get to visit, but it’s meant to reduce angel racism. When this was introduced in Heaven it was very unpopular with angels, and many of them rebelled, fleeing to Earth in secret.
Andrew loves Oren and doesn’t believe she’s a traitor, so with the aid of Elijah (he, Elijah, and Oren were of the first gen raised in the guardian program, by Archangel Michael no less) he takes his three annoying teen angels to earth to secretly look for her.
One of the rebel angels, Archangel Gabriel, meets with Lia. They want to find Oren to convince her to go to Hell. It turns out the demon Kai isn’t really evil or anything, and she needs to go to hell because the fallen angel Uriel is there and needs to speak with her. This is because Gabriel is Oren’s father, and did a ritual on her so she’d contain the soul of Lucifer. You see, Heaven has a corruption problem evidently ( I don’t know if it’s like a magical rot or just literal political corruption ) and Oren-Lucifer is the only one who can stop it by fighting Archangel Michael. In this case AA Mike is just a pompous evil dude, and Lucifer was the good guy, history is just written by victors etc.
The two demons Kai sent up meet with Lia and Gabriel and join forces to look for Oren. They bump into Andrew and the teens and join up with them. Though Andrew has many reservations about working with literal demons and rebel angels, he gets over it pretty quick.
Kai brkngs Uriel Oren’s missing wing, and demands she just make her own angel if she wants Oren so much. Uriel makes a weird feral, mindless clone of Oren then sends her up to Earth. This is found by the angel/demon team immediately and it leads to literally nothing, as pretty quickly some Uriel sends a demon to retrieve the double and destroys it.
Oren and Skylar hang out and summon Kai with menstrual blood. They trick him into giving up information and Oren agrees to go to Hell. She meets with Uriel who explains Lucifer was the good guy and Oren has his soul, she also gives Oren cool armor and a flaming sword, then lets her go since Oren rejects being Lucifer.
The angel/demon team also has been learning about the Lucifer soul thing throughout this. Oren is one of the last to know, and a lot of the book is taken up by people learning and arguing about this soul thing. Or worrying how characters who already know might feel when they learn.
The team finds the old livestream of Oren’s wings and talks to Skylar under the guise of wanting to do a cosplay meet up. The angel teens meet Oren at the cosplay event, but Michael interupts. He’s hiding inside the body of Oren’s occasional fling, and asks her to walk with her. He uses the time getting her alone to stab her, noting he’s always known she had Lucifer’s soul and thus this has to happen.
Oren gets very upset and lights up with her Lucifer powers again, injuring Michael, who flees. Oren collapses. End.
More streamlined plot
That’s a lot of names! I didn’t even mention all the characters or lesser plots. Oren’s occasional boy who Michael inhabits comes up for several chapters, there’s an angel soldier embroiled in Oren conspiracy, Elijah has a lot of chapters, Oren has two adult children we check in on a few times…
Ultimately the story is that Oren is accidentally named a fugitive after discovering strange light powers. Friends go looking for her. She decides to talk to the demon who’s been trying to get her to come to Hell with him for like twenty years, and decides to go. Here she learns she’s Lucifer and her semi-dad Michael is evil. She makes peace with the notion as her friends track her down. Before she can meet them, she is attacked by Michael but fights him off. The end.
Writing and editing and also humor
I’m not going to pretend the book would be better with only Oren’s POV, but there’s definitely a severe lack of her and too much bloat from other people. At times the book takes a cheeky tone, and at others it wants to be a world-spanning epic ensemble from Heaven to Hell- both are tones that work great with multi POV third person like this, but Soul never nails any particular tone.
As we introduce Heaven, imagine for a moment, a clean room. No, more pristine than that. Less furniture, but still with that ‘Waiting Room’ feel to it. Timeless. Paint the walls white, brighter than is comfortable to the eye, go on, think about it.
Oh, you added carpet? That’s a little too nicebon the feet, isn’t it?
Tile. Cold tile.
34
Let’s talk about the above. This is cheeky comedy writing, very much in the style of… It would like to be Hitchhiker’s Guide, or Good Omens, but it just doesn’t nail it. The bit here of directly talking to the reader goes on for a while longer, and beyond the introduction to Hell being similar, it’s not a repeated theme. It reads like a joke the author felt was funny and wanted to keep- but then didn’t consider how odd it is if it’s the only part in the book that sounds like this.
The tone is an issue in general. Soul is not a comedy book, but it is full of jokes. Jokes which mostly come in the flavours of swearing, pop culture, and memes.
Humor will always be a mileage varying thing, so I think it’s important to think carefully about your book when you work with it. Is this a comedy? Will these jokes make sense to someone who isn’t on Tumblr, or will they look bizarre?
“Haruto! Stop running with your arms back like that! I told you, it creates more drag!” He barked.
“It makes me run faster!” The boy argued, fucking his upper half further into the awkward positioning.
67, this extended joke on Naruto running from a character named Haruto will come back several times
And yes I do realise that I myself sit here, an author of a supernatural drama-comedy. I don’t really claim to remember if I was funny either. I definitely feel like I could have written Soul of Lucifer in another timeline though. There’s even titled chapter names! These vary from making you go ‘heh’ (A Prince in poured spirits) to ‘…’ (Harsh) to ‘c’mon’ (The best way to come to terms with being a protagonist is to ignore it all together). A lot of the humor feels just… Meme-like? Simple. A cheeky tone of voice or an extended eyebrow raise at some easy punchline.
Obviously I think the plot is a bit flawed and the jokes don’t land, but I actually want to talk about the writing and editing too. This might sound like I’m dunking on the entire book, and sure, I wasn’t dazzled by the characters either. But actually I’ll talk about the world building and ideas later which I thought had a lot of potential, so there.
The writing of this book is unpolished. I was really excited to read this book, and my heart fell on page one when I took in just the writing style.
Down her intense blue eyes fell, a hand daring a moment to remove the frayed sweater that served as gauze for the gape in her abdomen. Scarlet stained the garment, infusing its cornflower fibers with her draining life liquid.
The red hue glitteted inconsistently with each passing streetlight, dryness overcoming the fabric as the blood began to clot.
1
And
She brought her clean hand up, brushing back the pesky baby hairs at the front of her scalp, the usual tickle an insult to what was surely a blackened eye.
The golden river that dripped to her elbow was speckled with dirt and gravel now, pieces falling into her lap as she adjusted.
2
I think these are great quotes to show my point. In the first chapter especially, the description is so overdone it borders on purple. I realize three paragraphs isn’t enough to get a full picture, so believe me: there’s a lot of unnecessary description in the first chapter, which occasionally falls into confusing word choices like ‘the golden river dripped’. It took a few reads to grasp it was talking about her hair.
Around this overwrought writing is the issue of structure, which perhaps explains why I have such a bone with this first chapter’s descriptions: nothing else happens. The first chapter of the book is Oren climbing into a bus, bleeding, and that is it. Much of it inexplicably becomes about a random child who starts talking to her in that unrealistic kid voice people use, about dinosaurs. Internally, Oren rambles as she tried to recall recent events.
It’s a really bad beginning to a book. The idea of a bloody angel climbing into public transit amuses me as a scene, but the execution is very flat. Nothing happens and as readers, we don’t learn much.
See, Soul has this flaw, I think: it begins in the wrong place. We don’t see Oren and Kai fight, resulting in her losing a wing and Liatiel leaving her. We start with an amnesiac on a bus talking to a kid. Much of the narrative acts like we are not new to this universe, with names and terms being thrown out in passing before anyone explains. Rather than some action to set us up or a graceful arrival to the universe, we’re left scratching and wondering if the prose will be this thick the entire time.
(The prose notably changes to be lighter later on, perhaps because most of the book is characters talking to each other rather than enviroments or actions. The biggest offense is probably the frequent fanfic style labelling, of ‘the doctor’ ‘the angel’ ‘the naturopath’)
One thing in the novel too that must be said is the internal dialogue. Every POV character has internal italics thoughts we’re privy to, and there’s a lot of them. The cast is often having multi paragraph thoughts that slow the whole book down. I’m really not a fan of italics thoughts like this beyond being maybe a line, for comedic effect. I think personally this sort of internal thought can be expressed outwardly instead, in action, dialogue, or even narration. The countless swaths of first person thinking is absolutely not necessarily and one of my biggest gripes.
Characters
My view the story is over full is definitely a point I ought to repeat here. I haven’t talked much about some of the cast because they simply didn’t need POVs, let alone multiple chapters, and many of them don’t serve any particular purpose.
Because we have a lot of characters over multiple POVs over 70 short chapters, I don’t feel like anyone here is a strong character. They all definitely are characters, like I get the broad strokes of most everyone well enough, but there’s simply too many, and the plot is so simple/short they don’t have much chance to change, react, or grow. Oren at least probably is the most clear, she’s sort of the tough flippant but nurturing type and now that I think about it she’s pretty much just Max from Maximum Ride. Huh.
I mostly made this space to discuss the three hip angel teens, who are comic relief and just the worst. As seen, one is Haruto: he’s just a Naruto, the manga, joke. Beyond his name and stance on meme running, he basically has the same personality. His squad has Sera and Aarav. Sera is extremely irritating, and most of her joke is that she’s annoying and no one likes her- she’s the daughter of two archangels and is very spoiled and privileged. Aarav is the stereotypical nerd who’s always reading. These teens are in a lot of the book and contribute way more to the plot than you’d think for bit characters. Unfortunately, they never really stop acting like children, making constant meme jokes and bickering constantly. They’re not charming, they’re really pretty irritating!
I should briefly mention the demons. There’s Kai, who’s sort of the cool demon Prince type… Until an extended comedy bit where he’s just a joke about how pathetically egotistical he is. The joke here fails because he is made to be such a moron you wonder if you’re reading a book for kids. There’s also Kai’s henchmen, who I haven’t particularly talked about yet. There’s two of them, but there really only needs to be one- Edvin, older brother, does things in the plot. Dimitri, his brother, is his foil who also when needed is reduced to the intelligence of a golden retriever, and mostly seems to be in the book to be a “soft boi”. It’s weird.
Archangel Michael is my special man. He’s the bad guy here! He’s also very lacking as a villain, and I think it’s only because of structural flaws. He’s a generic baddie, but we learn about Oren being Lucifer and him being evil before we really know Michael is Oren’s guardian, and thus a father figure. We have a tiny bit explaining this but it’s not enough, and when Oren accepts herself as Lucifer, she pretty much shrugs off her relationship with Michael entirely. It would have been great to see and hear Michael much earlier in the story as a sympathetic dad Oren feels complicated feelings for. We barely get a hint of what would make for a great dynamic. Instead, Michael’s first POV is very late, and he’s just a bloodthirsty idiot who everyone hates.
LGBT aside
There’s LGBT stuff in this book but way less than I expected. Oren mentions ex girlfriends and there’s some minor gay characters.
The decoy double clone thing
A hand plunged against the flesh, stuck to the webbing in a wet, grotesque grasp. It drew against the surface from within, growing at it for structure. A wail gurgled from inside, gasps for air.
Moist flapping followed, a large figure slashing at the skin. The sack ruptured. The prince jumped away as a liquid poured out over the ground, thick with blood.
The ruptured womb deflated as its contents were emptied. A new form was revealed, quivering and slick with afterbirth.
139
Sorry for making you read the above. It’s like the only Uber gross body horror in the whole book, and I’d like to file a restraining order against ‘moist flapping followed’ specifically. Right as I finished transcribing that quote I suddenly vomitted. Coincidence?? Yeah, I have COVID and I feel wretched. Don’t think moist flapping helped though.
I covered it in the summary but it bares repeating. At the start of the book Oren loses a wing, and Kai brings it back to Hell with him. His sister boss Uriel wants him to get Oren, but after so many failures he suggests she just make her own angel from Oren’s wing. Uriel makes the above quote happen and out comes an exact doubt of Oren, only she’s pretty much mindless. They send her up to Earth for unclear reasons, where she’s found by the main character team just… Wandering. They immediately know it’s not actually Oren and take her home, where she stands around doing nothing. At this point, Uriel sends a type of demon mysteriously called a ‘mantis’, who just teleports up, grabs the fake, and teleports down in an instant. When Oren later goes to Hell, Uriel reattaches her missing wing – by melting the double down again.
It serves no point. It’s so bizarre as a ‘sub plot’ because… well, who would ever predict it? A clone is made out of a wing then turned into a wing again. Why. What does this do. Because there’s so many POVs the double exists for a good portion of the book, but not on page, and not being relevent. I’m just so confused by this choice.
World lore
We all know I care a lot about angel lore, yeah? As much as I think the book fails, I do like the lore and ideas going on. There’s a lot of them and they’re pretty unique. I appreciate a decision in angel lore that makes me go ‘interesting choice’.
We are though missing a lot of lore. It’s a deliberate choice I think to feel like we’re in the POV of characters who already know this stuff, but considering Oren spends a while explaining how angels work to a human, it’s odd not to know every for certain.
Angels, for example. They are born and grow, though they grow up quite slowly. The hip angel teens are 33, but look and act about 16. Angels can be born from angel couples, angel and human, and I believe human/human- perhaps if there’s an angel in the bloodline it can crop up suddenly? Angels are of equal power whether they’re full angel or not, though there is a lot of angel racism.
Angels until about 130 years ago were raised by parents. Now they are assigned a gaurdian angel who acts as a mentor and surrogate parent. They still can visit their parents but usually only on set shifts. The guardian trains them in basic things like fitness, fighting, law, human lore, and whatever else. The introduction of this system was very controversial and split heaven, with many leaving and vowing against heaven.
Heaven is run by a council of Archangels with Michael as the sort of de facto leader. It’s set up quite military like, with most angels being scouts, who run missions among humans, and skirmishers, who fight demons. The two types often work together in pairs. Above them is a whole milkitary structure, though I don’t believe there is any true ‘battlefield’ beyond skirmishes on earth.
Among the angels who fell (in the first revolution) was Uriel, who was in love with Lucifer. Uriel however went to Hell to chill in a cave, and created all the demons using her body. Now she’s just purple fog. Notably she made like, four classes of demons with Latin names and one secret bonus one, a detail which doesn’t matter but goes on for a while. Hell itself just looks like a run down city in a cave. Most demons just look like hot people.
One of the demons Uriel made is Luc, who is literally purgatory.
Angels fight using halos- shining discs they can summon at will. However a halo sticks around after being conjured and takes a lot of energy to make, so it’s not quite an endless frisbee baragge.
In Heaven, there’s a device called Heaven’s Eye that lets you find anyone on Earth. It’s guarded by a bunch of eyeless angels in funky outfits. Heaven itself is very beaurocratic and white looking. One of the main jobs is being a scribe and just doing paperwork.
God is mentioned but there’s no lore given.
Okay, I hope you found any of that interesting. That’s most of it. God am I sick right now.
Anyways, I think a lot of this lore is unique and interesting. I find the guardianship trip thing a little too eerily like Naruto, probably because of the kid named Haruto and his friend, high energy pink themed girl, but it’s a new idea in the world of angel lore.
We’re all used to the rough vision of Heaven and Hell here, but the content is different. I like cliches and then I hate cliches, it was nice to see just Uriel as a demon making fog cloud as opposed to Lilith, and a modern school like heaven where kids and sex were all just fine.
I often was left wanting a bit more, but I think it’s all a good structure to work with. I think with some fixes it’s a very solid world, and it at least dates to break from angel demon conventions a bit while not being entirely alien.
Conclusion
COVID sucks so much, aaaaaaaa. Seriously I was so proud of not getting it at all! Aaaaaa!!!!
Anyways, I feel Soul of Lucifer is an above average Wattpad read, but desperately needs more thorough editing, almost certainly a comprehensive look through that might mean altering significant parts of the book. A total rewrite might work well, since I think there’s some meat on these there bones. Not enough though.
oh my god the supernatural references I forgot the-
Another reoccurring joke in this book is the TV show supernatural. The dude who finds Oren, Skyler, is a big fan, as are his flatmates. I mentioned a cosplay meet up as a crucial plot point, way back in the summary. That meet up? Supernatural!
Except it’s not supernatural, it’s called ‘Hunters’. It’s obviously the same though, from the two men and their angel in a cheap trenchcoat. There’s very extended references to this fake show. Oren summons Kai with period blood and the guidance from Skylar, who just copies from the TV show. It works. They even make a devil’s trap and a salt circle!
The cosplay meet up arrangement is for Hunters, so both sides of the cast has to go on extended bits about who they’re dressing up as and why. Two non white characters even get to riff about being made to play a character that matches their race or else facing racism for not matching their character’s race. Like, it’s supernatural guys. Why does anyone on your college campus even see you in flannel and clock instantly it’s cosplay? Why does everyone care about supernatural? The book literally takes place in 2025.
As part of dressing up for Hunters cosplay, Oren memorized a bunch of Hunters trivia which she is then quizzed on for a chapter. It’s just her explaining biographies of these parodies of Sam and Dean for more than one page. Yet when she goes, not realizing the people she’s meeting with are her allies, she immediately tells someone she’s never seen the show to no consequence. L
Also even in this fake Supernatural Dean and Castiel don’t get together 
Crow Defeats Books 