Falling Angels

Falling Angels

Falling Angles isn't about friends turning into lovers, finding a way to be with the one you want to be with, or a prince and a princess trying to fight a wizard in order to get to each other. No, this story is about something much more than any of that. Falling Angels is about rights; about the right for Women to vote. Along the way Tracy Chevailer strings along another story about two girls growing up in a world where women lead the housewife role...but things are changing. Families are split in two, between for women suffrage and against. Who will win?

Books in the historical fiction can go one of two ways. They can be more Fiction such as books with wizards and potions, or more historical, like woman suffrage. Falling Angels is a very historical type of book. This book is funny, sad, heartwarming, and also a little bit cheeky. One thing Falling Angles is not, would be romantic. Families are torn apart, children and mothers die, fathers rage and women go to jail. Little girls sneak to the cemetery and meet up with a blunt, mischievous boy, the nanny is sneaking around with a gardener and causes complications. Angels fall from their pedestals, a man is almost buried alive, and is never the same as he was before.

Woman suffrage was a main part of the early 1900's time era. This story goes along very well with the way things were back then. At the begging of the story, there were horse carriages everywhere and the girls were just children. This book shows them growing up in a changing world as their family lives get more and more complicated. Most men were against women suffrage, just like Maud's dad. Even though Maud's mother was completely for it and helped lead the movements in that town and the surrounding area.

Another part of wanting to write a book like this is because things were changing, and not just with women and their rights to vote, but the Victorian era was ending and the Edwardian era was beginning. The Victorian era had strict codes and an elaborate commemoration of the dead. I the Edwardian era things became more modern with cars and less importance to the dead.

Tracy Chevailer found herself in an old cemetery in London wondering what if there was one family who held on strongly to the Victorian era, and another family found themselves engulfed in wanting change more modern? What if their daughters became best friends? What if they met a boy who didn't look onward to the future, or backward into the past? What if the families had plots in the cemetery right next to each other, but the wives didn't like each other in any way at all? The two families were 100% different, and they disliked just about everything the other did. The traditional oversized urn vs. the obnoxious Angel, both of which being too close to each other, and too big for the other.

I really enjoyed this book. It was fun to read about these children