"Angels of Destruction" by Keith Donohue

In the middle of a bitterly cold winter, beautifully described, a nine-year-old girl appears to a widow. Is the girl really the old lady's grand-daughter, or is she a  runaway, a con artist or a lunatic, or is she actually an angel? And how will her arrival change what happened ten years ago, when the widow's daughter ran away with a boyfriend to join a terrorist group called the Angels of Destruction? 

There are parallels are motifs running through this clever story. It flits around the margins of otherworldiness, so you never see the monsters full on (when they can start looking silly), and there are always questions left in your mind.

The book is told in three parts, the middle taking us back ten years, with a present-day epilogue, in the past tense, from a multi-character PoV.

 Selected quotes:

• "Winter blew right through her." (1.1)
• "The wind blew against his face and through his hair, for the stranger carried winter in his coattails." (1.5)
• "The few other shoppers ... shuffled in a daze from bin to bin, and Margaret read in every face some suffering or disappointment, their hopes and dreams marked down, 40 percent off." (1.9)
• "The lonesome, like the mad, know one another on sight." (1.10)
• "The depth of his emptiness scared her." (1. 29)
• "She saw his unabashed hope, his bright smile. A smile that said the world will one day crush such a boy, but not today." (1.30)
• "We live more in our bodies than they do. Boys give them up as young men, discarding the body to live inside their minds. But girls and their bodies become women and live in the same skin." (2.4)
• "Game of life, indeed. It is no game, let me tell you, but a jigsaw that you can never finish. Always a couple of pieces missing, or one that fits in nowhere, and the cover to the box is gone, so you've no picture to offer a clue as to what it's supposed to look like." (2.14)
• "Kids may not know a lot about life - but don't say the young don't know about love. It's the only thing they do know." (2.18)
• "An order of bullets stood in the French fry holsters." (3.11)
• "You sit in a spot and don't realize that everything you left is changing too, and you think that maybe someday you'll get the chance, but then it's too late." (3.13)
• "All of us seek forgiveness." (3.15)

Also by Keith Donohue and reviewed in this blog:

• The Stolen Child

May 2022; 347 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

I had to look up Ecclesiastes chapter 7 verse 4, which is referenced in part two of the book, so I thought I would help the reader. It says: "The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of pleasure." (New International Version).