While the publishing company is Five Smiling Fish, I believe there are only three smiling authors in their line-up. I've already reviewed Sidney Reetz's 'The Devil's Codex' and Megan E. Vaughn's 'The Emerald Door', so it's about time I caught up with Kira Shay's 'Angel's Prophecy'. Of course, caught up isn't the best phrase to use here, because both 'The Devil's Codex' and 'Angel's Prophecy' have sequels and, if I don't own copies already, I should remedy that next Phoenix Fan Fusion.

'Angel's Prophecy' is far closer to 'The Devil's Codex' than 'The Emerald Door' and not only because they're clearly the beginnings to longer stories rather than self-contained ones that wrap up well within one set of pages. The most obvious reason is that they're both about angels, though Shay's take on them is very different to Reetz's, the one shared approach being the abiding wish of any angel stuck outside of Heaven to return there at some point. It drove Lucifer in 'The Devil's Codex' and it drives the prophecy of the title here, as well as individual actions by individual angels.

In short, the Angelic War is still raging, the forces of light against the forces of darkness, but it will be ended when an angel born on Earth teams up with a human to bring all angels back to Heaven. Uncle Azra certainly believes that this particular born angel is his ward Orion and we kind of have to accept that because he's the lead character of this novel. He's going by Ryan now because they moved to Los Angeles and he's on his fourteenth time through high school, but it seems very much like a natural fit, given that Azra surfs and Ryan skates and listens to punk music. How they got by in a Cambodian village, I have no idea.

I should add that, if I understood correctly, Ryan isn't forever young, making his hanging about in high school a creepy thing. Angels are created by the Divine, but he wasn't. He was born the way you and I were, except that his parents were both angels, Rasheym and Indra. He's the first of his kind, very possibly the only one, given that angels don't seem to be about sex, and love is more for everybody than a personal relationship. They're both dead, leaving Uncle Azra to take care of him, which he's still doing a few millennia later. Born angels must grow at a startlingly different speed to we humans. Uncle Azra is old enough to not care about convention. Ryan isn't.

If you were paying attention, that prophecy that may or may not be about him needs a human too. They've been searching for that human for a long time now, killing off Fallen Ones as they go, and Ryan finally believes he's met her. She's Stella Evangeline and she's a new kid at his school, having transferred in. They generate sparks immediately, though any likelihood of a regular high school relationship is rather dampened by the fact that conversation is going to have to come around to that prophecy and, well, how do you explain that without seeming to be really really weird?

There's a good setup here for an urban fantasy novel and I haven't read enough books of its ilk to have become tired with angels yet, so I lapped up the mythology. I have to admit that I had plenty of sinking feelings when I realised that it was going to dive into high school romances, which break the creepy formula into pieces. You can safely date someone who's above half your age plus seven without being creepy. For an eighteen-year-old, that means sixteen. For a forty-year-old, it means twenty-seven. Orion is a few thousand years old, so him dating a high school girl is always going to be creepy. Fortunately, Kira Shay keeps it awkward for other reasons and they suffice.

Fortunately, this lives or dies on its mythology rather than its high school romance. You know Ryan is a unique soul, an angel born to two watchers or grigori. I may not have caught every nuance but they're kind of in the middle of the Angelic War, in between the good guys and the bad guys, even if their morality tends to come closer to what we might see as good. The real good guys are single-minded enough to want to destroy the watchers as abominations. Azra calls them Choir Boys even if they have more official names. The bad guys are Fallen Ones, sent to Hell in the Angelic War. It's killing them that watchers see as redemptive acts.

You should also know that all angels can teleport, though doing so attracts Fallen Ones, so it tends to be a tool kept for special occasions. Ryan certainly doesn't want to attract them, given that he's not supposed to even exist, masking his true nature by wearing enchanted beads, but he's unable to teleport on his own anyway. He can't do everything angels can typically do, though he does heal quickly. I wonder how quickly he'd get drunk on Heavenly Nectar. It certainly knocks Uncle Azra for six!

I liked Ryan, which was never guaranteed given this setup, and that's a good thing because I doubt the book would have held up if I didn't. I liked Stella more, though I won't explain why because that way lies spoilers. I'll just say that she's not quite the clueless human girl Ryan initially believes and that means that she says a lot of things and endures a lot of others while knowing a lot more than she lets on. I didn't like Ascher as much, though, as Ryan's mum's best friend, he's supposed to be a figure of both authority and stability for Ryan. Uncle Azra should be even more of both, but he's a glorious whackjob, underdressing for the climate and teaching a goat called Beth to surf. He's an anime character in an urban fantasy novel and I couldn't be happier about that.

And, while I want to talk about a lot more stuff, not least a certain object stolen from Heaven that serves as the MacGuffin of the piece, I shouldn't because it would be easy to spoil this novel and I don't want to do that. What I will underline is that 'Angel's Prophecy' is very much a beginning, not a fully self-contained novel. Shay covers a lot of ground in its pages but she does not end the story. The prophecy is not fulfilled by the time we turn the final page, because that story continues on in 'Legend of the Strega'. Whether it finishes there or not, I have no idea, but I'd like to find out.

For now, you might like this series if you're an urban fantasy fan, an anime fan or a fan of Korean or Japanese high school dramas. If you like all the above, then this ought to be right up your alley. ~~ Hal C F Astell