Full of doubt I stand, John Milton Paradise Lost |
Over the past six months, Rachel Forsythe's perfect life has descended from the ideal to the tragic. The younger of her two daughters is dying of cancer. Despite her standing as the wife of a respected Mormon bishop, neither God nor medical science has blessed her with a cure.
Or has He?
"I don't care if faith no greater than a mustard seed can move mountains. The mountains can stay put. All I'm asking for is the life of one child."
Milada Daranyi, chief investment officer at Daranyi Enterprises International, has come to Utah to finalize the takeover of a medical technology company. Bored with her downtown hotel accommodations, she rents a house in the Salt Lake City suburbs.
And then the welcome wagon shows up. Her neighbors perceive her to be a beautiful, intelligent, and daunting young woman. But Rachel senses something about Milada that leads her in a completely different--and very dangerous--direction.
"If Jennifer became like me, whose blood would flow in her veins? Whose daughter would she be? Tell me that is something you could live with."
Rachel's suspicions are right. Milada is homo lamia. A vampire. Fallen. And possibly the only person in the world who can save her daughter. As Rachel uncovers Milada's secrets, she becomes convinced that, as Milton writes, "all this good of evil shall produce."
Pushing every moral boundary in order to protect their families, these two women will ultimately pay a price higher than either of them could have imagined.
Book blurbs
Maralise at Blog Segulla calls Angel Falling Softly
a good read. I would even venture to say that it's a great read . . . . I was captivated by the tight and nuanced writing in Woodbury's most recent release from Zarahemla Books.
With some qualifications, Doug Gibson of the Ogden (Utah) Standard-Examiner declares it
better than 99 percent of Mormon fiction out there. It takes our beliefs out of comfort zones, inviting analysis and debate. No matter what happens, we've learned something.
According to Angela Hallstrom, author of Bound on Earth,
is more than a good read. It is a provocative meditation on life and death that will leave readers both satisfied and unnerved. It kept me reading, and it kept me guessing.
And Stephen Carter, editor of Sunstone Magazine, says it's "one of the best Mormon novels ever written,"
proof positive that Mormon fiction is not dead. And even if it was, Woodbury has called it from its grave, bestowed it with immortality, and given it a mighty fine set of literary fangs.
Book details
Angel Falling Softly (ISBN-10 0978797167 ISBN-13 978-0978797164) can be purchased at Amazon as a trade paperback
The Mobipocket (PRC), Adobe PDF and plain text ebooks (all three formats included) can be downloaded from Payloadz using PayPal ($4.95).
I will be publishing Angel Falling Softly online in serial novel format. Over the next year, a new chapter will be posted at the beginning of each week with annotations (click on the chapter number).
The author
Eugene Woodbury spent his childhood in the upstate New York community of Scotia-Glenville. After serving for two years in the LDS Tokyo South Mission, he graduated from Brigham Young University with a B.A. in Japanese and an M.A. in TESOL.
His stories have appeared in The New Era, Cricket, Sunstone, The American Gardener, and Clubhouse Magazine. He has twice been a Utah Original Writing Competition finalist, and is a recipient of the Sunstone Foundation Moonstone Award for short fiction.
He lives in Orem, Utah, where he works as a free-lance writer and translator.
