A Madness of Angels

This was fun once I made it past the over-written beginning. Dialogue was decent and I liked Griffan's take on urban magic. I'd read another in this series.

2,5/5
This book was basically that person we all know, who calls you on the phone and while you seriously care about them, they just don't know when to shut up and end their endless stories.
As a lot of people point it out, the prose was so flowery it just felt like the author was sometimes completely losing herself in the details and forgetting about the fact that she was actually telling a story. Every little thing needed to have a million details, with at least six examples. No, you didn't just have food in your fridge, like milk and eggs, but milk, eggs, butter, pickles, juice, jam, and the list just goes on and on. Don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with being eloquent, but this is not eloquence, this is being way too verbose.
At the beginning, through about the first third I actually kind of liked the different style. Then the boredom started. I honestly believe the author's style would have worked beautifully in a shorter piece of maybe a couple of hundred pages, that is mostly based on the atmosphere. With a book this long? It gets frustrating.
The magic, the different clans of magical people were great. They just felt kind of... wasted when the author seemingly forgot about what she could have done with them if most of the book wasn't spent on talking about trash (thanks lady, I know what thrash is) or feelings. At this point we simply weren't allowed close enough to any of the supporting characters to actually feel too much of a bond, which is a waste, even for a first book in the series.
The main was nice, I actually liked him. His only issue was... again, with the writing. Matthew, the protagonist keeps switching to referring to himself as ‘we', which took some time for me to get used to. It gets an explanation later on, but it can get frustrating sometimes and at the beginning it confused me quite a few times.
All in all, I enjoyed the story, not so much the execution, which is a shame. I'm definitely going to give the second book a try and see what happens next.

I feel a little bit conflicted about this book.

The magical mechanics were compelling, and I actually liked the I/we switching and didn't find it confusing (and it was enough to make the slow revelation sensical and not jarring). On the other hand, it was WAY too wordy; while fun enough to read, Griffin's no Hardy or Melville in the descriptive realm. This would've been much more satisfying at 300-400 pages instead of 610. It started interestingly enough, then sort of sagged, but Oda breathed some live and interpersonal conflict into the story and kept me from giving up a third of the way through. If anything, this book was too much plot and not enough characterization and personal interactions, but it got a bit more emotionally compelling towards the end, so I might as well give the second book in the series a good.

All in all, enough interesting magical details to keep me reading, but it made me long for a good character study.