Archangel by Sharon Shinn

Four hundred years ago, the colonists came to Samaria, carried in the hands of their God, Jovah. And Jovah watches over them still, sending down food and medicine when they ask for it, clearing away storms or bringing rain. To intercede between the humans and Jovah, he created angels, and made one among them Archangel, Jovah's foremost servant, to keep watch over humans and pray for his intervention on their behalf when needed.

Every year, the Archangel must sing the Gloria to Jovah, and if it is not sung, Jovah's lightning will destroy the world, or so it is said. The current Archangel is named Raphael and Gabriel is his soon-to-be successor, and he needs a wife, or Angelica, to sing the Gloria with him. And so, reluctantly, for he does not wish a wife, Gabriel goes to the Oracles to have Jovah tell him who his wife will be. And a bride is picked for him, Rachel, daughter of farmers in a nearly barren outer region of Samaria.

But when Gabriel tracks down the farm to find his wife, he finds that the farm is long gone, destroyed by some misfortune, and there is no sign that any people have lived there in a very long time. Gabriel knows his chosen wife is still living, since Jovah can track whether or not someone is still alive, but he cannot find her.

Rachel is a bondslave in the human city of Semmorah, and she is still not used to living as a slave. Every day she is forced to work for the man who owns her, and her heart still aches for Simon, the Edori lover she was forcibly parted from by Jansai slavers. Her owner's house is getting ready for a wedding, the lord's son is to marry a woman from another house to bring their fortunes together. But luck comes to Rachel when she is asked to do the hair of Mary, the bride-to-be.

She finds the young woman eaten up by worry, and very nervous. Rachel manages to calm her and do her hair in an Edori style, and everyone loves it. The two of them quickly become friends, and Mary decides to keep Rachel with her when she and her husband Daniel move to a new house together. But not as a slave. Mary intends to free Rachel and pay her a wage, which makes Rachel's heart sing. Also invited to the wedding are Raphael, the Archangel and Gabriel, his successor, along with other angels, to sing for the success of the wedding and the fertility of the bride.

But when Rachel comes face to face with Gabriel one morning, her Kiss, a crystal implanted in the flesh of her arm, flares with heat, as does Gabriel's, and he realizes that this slave is his promised Bride. He feels it is a disaster, as he doesn't even know if she can sing, let alone sing well enough to sing a Gloria with him. And he has less than six months to teach her.

Rachel doesn't want to be Gabriel's bride, and she views being carried off to be married to him as little better than slavery. Add to that an extreme fear of heights, and she has more than a few reasons to dislike the Aerie, her new home. Angels don't feel the cold as humans do, and so the Aerie is very cold to Rachel. And with no way for her to get down from the Height of the Aerie to the town of Velora below, the Aerie simply becomes a jail for her.

A certain perverseness makes her refuse to sing for Gabriel or anyone else in the Aerie, although she does listen to all the Glorias sung by the first Archangel, Uriel, and his Angelica, Hagar, a woman whose vocal range spanned three and a half octaves, but as she gets ready to learn the Gloria that she will sing, Gabriel is finding out some things he wishes he didn't know about Raphael, the current Archangel.

For one thing, Rachel appears to hate him, and for another, he seems to be ignoring pleas for help from the people he is supposed to be helping and protecting. Second, the people who live near the hold he rules, Windy Point, seem to be skeptical that Jovah even exists. Could it be that Raphael has lost his faith and his powers, and is lying to humans who are supposed to rely on him for guidance? And what of his seeming lust for power and control?

When Raphael kidnaps Rachel and keeps her away from the Gloria she is supposed to sing, can she and Gabriel overcome their differences to save the humans, angels and the entire planet? Or has the rot Raphael sowed become too deep?

This was a different sort of fantasy novel, as it is actually more of a science fiction novel. Readers are told that the humans on Samaria are actually colonists who came to the planet on the Spaceship Jehovah, and though we are not told, it is this ship that has apparently become their God. The Oracles are actually technicians, and maintain computers that can speak with the main computer on the Jehovah. Angels, then, are presumably some sort of gene-engineered humans, but must crossbreed with humans to make more angels, as crossing angels with angels results in freakish babies. But the nature of these "freaks" is never described. Are they bird-like, presumably the kind of genes that were crossed with the humans to produce angels, or something else? We're never told.

In a way, I wasn't sure how to take the whole "God as a Spaceship" idea. We're not told why the humans can't remember, after only 400 years, that the "Jehovah" was a spaceship that carried them to the planet, or how their language has changed so swiftly that only the Oracles can know or remember how to communicate with the ship. Leaving those unanswered questions aside, the story is more about the love that eventually develops between Gabriel and Rachel, and how their love is tested by the politics of the current Archangel, Raphael.

While there is an awful lot to like in this book, as the characterizations of both Gabriel and Rachel are strong and complete, there is a lot more that is glossed over and never explained, and left me wondering. Why did Raphael lose his faith and his powers? Did he suspect that Rachel was to become his successor's Angelica, and is that why he destroyed her parent's farm and left her an orphan? Or was that just a coincidence? And if it wasn't a coincidence, how did he know?

In addition to the attack on the farm of her parents, which we don't find out until later in the book, Rachel's distaste for him seems to rise from his attempt to debauch her early in the book, and he's guilty of many other things as well, which leads readers to detest him as well. But the plot holes and missed explanations left me feeling unsatisfied in a story sense at the end of the book. Yes, things turn out well in the end, but I would have liked more explanation.

I'd recommend this book, but with reservations about the hanging plot threads. The love story does just fine, other parts of the book not so well. But the world is well-drawn and makes you feel like you can see it in your mind if you just close your eyes.