Emma Scott’s Reviews > Angel Down > Status Update

I just punched the sky and yelled (silently don’t want to scare the child) F YEAH and holy shit and OMG this book. This. Effing. Book. 🤯🤯🤯🤯

Holy crap I think I stopped breathing for 30 pages

I’m going to call it right now: this is the best book I’m going to read in 2026. All y’all other books….game on.

Oh jeez now I want to write romance fanfic for Cyril Bagger because if he doesn’t get a happy ending…😭

… cobwebbed figureheads of futility, pointing future generations down the same useless paths… right after a guy, with grisly detail, is cut exactly in half by shrapnel. This book is a miracle.

“and how many times, while the flaking paint of the apartment flapped like shamefly wings from the vibrations of the organist…,had Cyril tried to pull his father from his whirlpool of ponderings, pull him literally by the sleeve, only for the Bishop to gently, crushingly, extricate his son‘s fingers and hand him the Bible to read, the way Red Cross nurses give a man about to be amputated a rag to bite on..”

This prose is so astonishing….with each “and” paragraph, I wonder if the author didn’t just take each one and decide to craft it impeccably alone— each stanza an island, while at the same time, it feels so effortlessly perfect and natural.

Daniel Kraus, I bow to you

Hardly begun and already amazed, inspired, and awed.

… the war won’t ever end, like the carnage won’t ever end, it’s a sentence in a book careening without periods, gasping with too many commas, a sentence that, once begun can’t ever be stopped…