I read to escape real life; to drift off into a world where I don’t have to stress about what is going on in my day to day. However, every once in a while, it’s nice to stumble upon one that shakes something so deep in your core. A novel that touches on real life issues and raises awareness and Quiet Angel by Prescott Lane is the perfect example. It provides a wonderful escape that makes you fall in love, but also delivers a very poignant, very heartbreaking tale of survivorship.
Layla has been through more hardships in her lifetime than any one person should have to endure. However, I admired that she didn’t let that bring her down. She never stopped believing in something and used it to strengthen her spirit rather than weaken her faith in her angels. We meet her when she is only sixteen years old, and even then, you could tell the world had taken pieces of her soul. She meets Gage, an eighteen year old boy who has his future laid out at his feet, and together for a summer, they begin to fill the voids for each other. Even at a young age, readers could see that he was smart, dedicated, and incredibly protective. Due to certain events, they separate only to run into each other many years down the road, and that is where the story truly begins. The two characters together gave you hope that true love does exist, even if their love only occurs inside the pages of a novel. I don’t want to say too much because I felt their love and desires so deep in my heart that there are simply no words that could do it justice; it’s something that needs to be read and experienced firsthand.
Quiet Angel is written in the third person so we get a very global perspective of things. We see how they met and then time is fast forwarded twelve years to their present day lives. There are times where I don’t like to see either of these things, but it worked perfectly for this novel. By including their time as teenagers, you see how this summer romance bloomed inside the characters’ hearts. By reliving time apart as adults, you see how much their first love stayed with each of them and only blossomed with that distance. Furthermore, I loved the survivorship element weaved throughout. Never once did Layla want us to feel like a victim of what she had been through; she conquered whatever life threw at her and didn’t want to be handled with kid gloves. There is just something about a book that has a deep-rooted message that forces you to open your eyes and appreciate what it is that you have, and also what you have been through.
The timing of discovering this story was impeccable. Someone asked me what kind of story I wanted to read recently. My response was something like the movie Grease, a summer love developing into more. It’s funny how sometimes the books your heart screams for are the ones that so gently fall into your lap. I absolutely devoured Quiet Angel. Lane has a beautiful way of writing that makes you fall in love with her style, her characters, and especially the cause. Once I started, it was nearly impossible to put down but I wouldn’t have had it any other way. This book touched my soul to the core and I can’t recommend it enough!