Rating: 
Summary: A MUST-READ book!!!!
Review: This book has touched part of my soul, that books rarely can touch. It has affected so much, that i couldn't part with it. Chevalier did a wonderful job in creating the characters. And the events were so vivid. I can say that i have lived the Victorian age. The plot, the characters, the events are so real life like. I have cried at the end. All i can say is that i recommend this book to everybody...
Rating: 
Summary: Falling Angels
Review: Falling Angels is about life at the beginning of the twentieth century. The lives of 2 middle class families are brought together by their two daughters and a gravediggers son who met in the cemetery and made friends with a 'naughty boy',the gravediggers son and all are frequently drawn to the cemetery for a variety of reasons. The novel is intriguingly written as each character writes what they Are thinking. The novel touches on ? wife swapping, paedophilia, adultery and more without mentioning these words but leaving it to the imagination. Tie all this up with the suffragette movement and it makes a compelling read. I wish each of these things had been pursued further but maybe the novel was all the better for that not being so. When I finished the book I realised a beautiful love story of forbidden love had been told.
Rating:
Summary: Fallen Angels
Review: I picked up this book after reading "Girl with a Pearl Earring" (one of my favorite books--truly wonderful!). I also enjoyed Fallen Angels, but it seemed almost not finished...i wish there was a sequel! I kept on wondering if anything would happend between Simon and Maude later (i realize there are strong class barriers, but, nonetheless, since Maude is so forward thinking, who knows what could have happened?)...and four years down the road from the end of the novel WW1 would begin...it just makes me wonder how this would affect the characters.
Rating:
Summary: captivating
Review: This book is of a totally different style to "Girl with a Pearl Earring" but is just as enticing! Tracy Chevalier has again managed to capture a period in time and tells a remarkable story through the voices of the different characters. Each chapter is devoted to a separate person and the story unfolds through the eyes of the working class, the middleclass and the new emerging women's movement of the time. The setting is around the local cemetry in England just after Queen Victoria's death. How times have changed! It's hard to imagine people truly lived and felt like this.Well worth a read.
Rating:
Summary: What staring at concrete angels will bring you to...
Review: ...is stories like the one in this book. I can imagine Chevalier sitting on a stone bench in the sun, staring at a concrete angel as the characters in this tale begin to form in her mind.It is a morose yarn, full of frustration and irony. Somber moods creep up on the reader. The variety of viewpoints left me with the feeling that there was more to be said by several characters and yet I was left with questions about others -- Mr. Coleman, in particular. Its strong points are in the imaginative story and vivid prose. Tracy Chevalier is definitely a worthy talent whose star will certainly blaze across our literary skies as she continues to write. She has a real gift for capturing the zeitgeist of an age in her stories.
Rating:
Summary: 4 & a half stars...
Review: This was a very good book. I agree that it wasn't as good as girl with the pearl earring...but it is good in it's own respects. I felt the plot twists kept me turning the pages, wondering....
I felt the characters were likeable and that we got to know them.
Quick & fun read.
Rating: 
Summary: Not As Good As The First Book..
Review: Having liked "Girl With The Pearl Earring" so much I was looking forward to Ms. Chevalier's latest book. My opinion; and yes, I was comparing it to the other book,clearly the better of two. I found the charactors in this book a bit flat and rather sterotypical as well as the monologue format tiresome after awhile. And the ending;I sensed some symbolism at work,but of what? Is it that hanging around graveyards is bad luck? Kitty was the most interesting charactor and I wished the entire book could've been focused on her;she's the only charactor that truly changed her life,while everyone else stayed essentially the same from the first chapter. I do think Chevaliers' one of the better writers out there so I will read her next book and hope it's better than this one.
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Summary: Victorian England from another view.
Review: I read Girl With a Pearl Earring last year, and it became my book of the year. It was therefor with great anticipation I bought this book, another book from Tracy Chevalier had to be another winner. Falling Angels is from the time period the years following the death of Queen Victoria in 1901. Two families meet at a cemetery, and this meeting has great influence on both families' lives. The story is told through several voices, all the members of the families, but also people around them. All the time we follow the same story though, the life of these two families, and how they react upon changes in society. Girl With a Pearl Earring is told through one girl only, and in the beginning I had problems with all the voices in this book. But as the story went on this became the perfect way to enlighten the points the book wanted to enlighten. The gravedigger boy had one story to tell, the girls of the two families other stories, still it is all woven into a whole, using a rich mixture of colors. I love Chevalier's way of writing. What made me give this book a four star instead of a five was the development of the story. The firts half of the book built up a family story, quite interesting in itselves, but then when the book became more and more a book about the suffragettes it lacked connection with the first part. All in all the book has some very good points though, and as several other reviewers have pointed out, the last hundred pages has alot of surprises. I look forward to the next book bu Tracy Chevalier. Britt Arnhild Lindland
Rating:
Summary: Melancholy and Captivating
Review: I just finished Falling Angels, which I read mostly due to an interest in Victorian England but also because I enjoyed "Girl With the Pearl Earring" so much. I found myself deeply drawn into this book. I have to admit it made me a little moody - large parts of it take place in a cemetery and there is a pervading sense of mortality throughout, but I also enjoyed seeing the same story from the viewpoints of a variety of characters. I didn't feel that the commentary by Jenny and Mrs. Baker was "unnecessary," but that it added to a fuller understanding of all of the issues the characters were involved in. A very interesting commentary on English womanhood during the Victorian and Edwardian eras, taking age, class, and educational differences into account.
Rating: 
Summary: Not as good as her first
Review: I eagerly anticipated reading this book after fallng in love with Chevalier's first novel, Girl with a Pearl Earring. Recently, I am into reading books with historical references that cover eras gone by. I thought a book about England at the turn-of-the-century would be interesting.
Halfway through, I remember thinking to myself that this book was going nowhere. Each of the characters spoke independently of one another in a kind of diary format. Little snippets of the story were weaved together as each character told their version of the tale. The absence of a single narrator left me feeling as if I were just a spectator in the lives of these people; I felt like I never had the opportunity to get close to any of them. Their stories seemed short and lackluster.
Fortunately, just as I was thinking about putting this book away, some excitement began. The last third of the novel had more action and drama, but not of a topic that I felt was compelling (at least, for me). This sudden whirlwind of action ended in tragedy and sadness, which seemed to be an underlying theme throughout. For lack of a better way to express myself, everyone always seemed so depressed-even when things were going well. As I read the book and pictured the scenes before me, I always seemed to imagine them in black and white images; I was unable to find any color in the story (if that makes sense).
I did manage to finish the book and do admit to enjoying it to some small degree. If you haven't read either of Chevalier's novels yet, I do recommend reading Girl with a Pearl Earring first. It was, by far, her better effort and achievement and thoroughly enjoyable. While Falling Angels is not on the top of my personal list, it seems as though many others found it to be a good piece of work. However, reading it first may not give you the true feel for this author's capabilities.
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