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Falling Angels
Falling Angels
Falling Angels
Audiobook7 hours

Falling Angels

Written by Tracy Chevalier

Narrated by Anne Twomey

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

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About this audiobook

In 1901 London, as the precise social order of the Victorian era winds down and the forward-looking Edwardian order takes wing, three strangers meet in the city's stony Highgate Cemetery. Beautiful Lavinia revels in the elaborate trappings of the past. Plain Maude strives to shape the future. Simon Fields, a boy their age, is bound by poverty and professional to the cemetery.As they explore the prejudices and flaws of a changing time, they bring their very different families together and ultimately discover that their fates are intertwined.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateSep 5, 2001
ISBN9781598871593
Falling Angels
Author

Tracy Chevalier

Tracy Chevalier is the author of eleven novels, including A Single Thread, Remarkable Creatures and Girl with a Pearl Earring, an international bestseller that has sold over five million copies and been made into a film, a play and an opera. Born in Washington DC, she moved to the United Kingdom in 1986. She and her husband divide their time between London and Dorset.

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Reviews for Falling Angels

Rating: 4.0638297872340425 out of 5 stars
4/5

47 ratings40 reviews

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Enjoyed this one, a light-ish read that was pretty interesting. One line/section in particular struck me like few have in a long time, really beautiful and heartbreaking. Immediately after that the book loses all plausibility and kind of falls apart. Great buildup though. I'm rating it 4 because it was fun to read despite the obvious problems.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A well written microcosim of Victorian England tols to us through the perspective of cemeteries, funerals, headstones and young girls.Chevalier is such an easy writer to read. She does not make her characters in "Falling Angels" ridiculous but real people with distinct personalities that allow us a glimpse into life during these times. Chevalier gives us the voices of life in 1908 from the insufferable Edith Coleman, a typical Victorian matron, to the vain and self absorbed Lavinia Waterhouse who at 10 yrs of age has written a young person's guide to mourning ettiquette. Simon Fields is a young gravedigger fascinated by Lavinia and Maude and a world he can only observe. Kitty Coleman's voice is of a young married woman constricted by marriage until she becomes a suffragette. Through her daughter Maude's voice we observe the changing climate of a young girls's life. At the end we are quite certain that Maude will attend university.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I found this book a rather boring read.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I absolutely loved "Girl with a Pearl Earring," so I felt compelled to read this one, now that it had sat on my shelf for a few years untouched. To think that such a treasure has been in my possession without me knowing it!"Falling Angels" is the story of two families in Victorian England, who live next door to each other. Both rivalry and friendship are involved in the Coleman and the Waterhouse's relationship, and the reader watches the members of the families age and grow up over a number of years. At first, this book was merely average in my eyes.I loved how the author wrote from different character's points of view, and I felt that it really filled out the story and made the people of her book more lifelike.However, not very much happened. Mrs. Waterhouse worries about Mrs. Coleman's home decor being superior to hers, a feisty in-law tries to take over care of the household, two young girls develop a friendship. Not the most riveting of events.And, the book seemed to wander along with the carefree ease of two of its main characters - silly, sheltered girls.But about halfway through, I was suddenly unable to put the book down. I had fallen in love with the characters, and felt as if they were my longtime friends.I realized that Tracy Chevalier had pulled a very clever trick.In the midst of my searching in vain for an exciting plot-line, I had missed what she had been building up the entire time: a story of people. A story of life (and death), and a group of people trying to make their way through the two. "Falling Angels" is gracefully beautiful, and powerful - but not the knock-you-off-your-feet sort of powerful. It doesn't need to be. This book is simply stunning, and certainly gets better and better as it goes.I found the slightly Gothic feel to this book a curious, and memorable aspect. The book opens with Queen Victoria's death, and ends with King Edwards. A prominent scene in the book is a graveyard. Instead of playing tea parties and doll houses, the two young girls in this book (Livy and Maude) play at the graveyard all day. Their best friend is a young gravedigger, and instead of looking through books of ponies and kittens, they enjoy perusing tombstones.I loved the character development of Maude's mother, Kitty Coleman. We see her introduced as a lively, beautiful young woman and slide into selfishness and neglect of her daughter. A skillful twist of this side of her is that her selfishness involves a just cause - the Suffragette movement, which provides the author with a complex, fine lined sub-plot that she pulls off flawlessly.Even more minor characters, such as the cook, or Maude's snooty grandmother, are realistic and personable.I love how all of the characters in this book came to life.I didn't think that I would be able to say this, but, "Falling Angels" definitely bests "Girl with a Pearl Earring" easily.I am so glad that I read it! An amazing book.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Another example of how excellent Chavalier's writing is. This story made me sad, but I really loved the way it was told.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is the story of 2 girls growing up in the early 1900’s in London. Maude Coleman and Lavinia Waterhouse are unlikely friends they meet in a London cemetery, where their family plots are next to each other. Their families really have nothing in common and after their first meeting they don’t see each other for awhile till they become neighbors and renew their friendship. Maude and her mother don’t always see eye to eye on things sinceher mother has discovered the suffragette movement and ends up in jail to the embarrassment of her entire family.Lavinia and her mother get along well although they seem to look down at others especially Maude’s mother Kitty. Kitty and her “radical” friends are preparing for the march to Hyde Park to promote a woman’s right to vote and so much goes horribly wrong that day that changes both families and the girls’ friendship forever.I always enjoy stories about suffragettes and this was no exception. I did listen to this on audio and there was one thing that bothered me about the audio version of this book is that it is set in England and the narrator did not have an English accent, but that doesn’t have anything to do with my enjoyment of the writing/storyline of this book.This was a well written story with fully fleshed out characters, there are a lot more stories going on than just the story of these two girls there is Simon the gravedigger, Jenny the maid and of course the mothers of these two girls.I enjoyed this story and would recommend it to anyone who likes historical fiction, suffragettes, and stories about friendship.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The word that best describes this book is lovely. There is a grace and melancholy air about the entire thing that evoked the time period and the sense of change and gradual loss of innocence that the two main characters were going through.I'm not sure how much of that sense was created by the narrative style. I am not a fan of the back and forth, multiple point of veiw narratives that interrupt the development of interest in and affection for a single character, but in this case, I think it added to the almost airy feel of the book - like we're more just lightly touching down in these people's lives that suppsed to empathize with them.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Great story about two families beginning with New Years 1900 in England. I love how it shifts from the point of view of the various characters.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Wonderful & deeply moving book by Tracy Chevalier. I loved the twists and turns of the 2 families and how their lives intertwined. The historical setting was brilliantly portrayed and set you right in the middle of the early 1900's, England. The story makes you think about consequences of your actions and the domino effect it has on all those around you.  
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I read The Lady and the Unicorn for my book club in 2005. I remember being bored, and my notebook annotation says simply, “Pretty flat.” This one was not boring. It was a lightning-fast read, in fact, although it was very odd.The falling angels of the title are a couple of girls, Maude Coleman and Lavinia Waterhouse, who become friends in childhood after meeting in a graveyard where their parents own plots. Maude’s mother is discontented in her marriage and eventually becomes involved in Britain’s radical suffragist organization, the Women’s Social and Political Union. Poor Maude seems an afterthought. Lavinia’s mother in more conventional, and so is Lavinia, who is annoyingly fixated on all that is proper and ladylike. The mothers, the daughters and various other characters get their turn at narrating the book.I said the book was odd. It was hard to get a handle on all of the characters, since the chapters presenting their voices were so, so short. Lavinia was the strongest presence and she was insufferable. In fact, the book was not overfilled with likeable characters. Both sets of parents seemed so careless of their children. If I were a reader who judged books based on my moral judgments of the characters, I would have disliked this book, but it was a good story, and that’s enough for me.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This may be one of my favorite books of all time. I loved the characters and learning about Highgate Cemetery, which I've added to my list of "Places I Want To Visit".
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Warm sensitive exploration of the transition from the formal gothic romanticism of Victorian England to the more relaxed pragmatism of the Edwardians as told in the first person by some eight protagonists linked by family or neighbourhood and by events at Highgate cemetery for the nine years of Edward VII's reign. Each character is carefully delineated with a sympathetic wit that makes even the most repellant of them credibly comprehensible. The contrasts of the two cultures are reflected in the novel's structure and its voices creating a curiously stark evocation of its time.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    It is 1901 and with the death of Queen Victoria, one age has ended and another begun. Through a variety of first-person narrators, the reader is introduced to two middle-class London families, the Colemans and the Waterhouses, as well as their servants, a cemetery manager and the son of a gravedigger, each contributing with their distinctive voice to the plot, which details the fortunes of each family by focusing on the two daughters.As can be expected from the author of Girl with a Pearl Earring, the atmosphere and the sense of being transported through time are excellent (in particular the sections covering the customs concerning the etiquette for mourning), but while the characters and their individual fates are engaging, the book never provides the wow! factor that is the sign of an outstanding read, and in the end there were few real surprises. The plot is almost exclusively character driven and hence on the slow side, and it is only in the last quarter of the book that events spiral out of control. Appropriately for a series of character studies there is a lot that remains unsaid, and the reader is required to read between the lines. And though I was always happy to spend time in the company of the protagonists, I didn't feel the urge to return to the novel at every possible opportunity. Still, as an exploration of days gone by it is very well done, and is certainly an eye-opener as to how much the Victorians and Edwardians turned death into a business (with the etiquette to be ignored at a person's peril!).The Times reviewer remarks in the novel's blurb that the book "shows both the strangeness of the world as it was and its closeness to our own time". I wholeheartedly agree with the first part of the sentence, but in my view it is only in the closing pages that I got the sense that progress had been made and society was entering the modern age.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Review for the Abridged Audio Book.This is probably my favourite Tracy Chevallier book and I had read it in book form before listening to the abridged audiobook several years later. It was beautifully narrated by Isla Blair and Jamie Glover and did not feel at all like an abridged version. Their two voices worked particularly well as the story is written in split narrative form and all the characters have a chance to speak, however briefly.Centering around Maud and Lavinia, who meet on the day of Queen Victoria's death, we meet both families and households. Although there is a well depicted class difference between the families, the girls become best-friends. Much of the action takes place in the cemetery, where Simon, the grave digger's lad and his father work. There are vivid descriptions of the cemetery, and death features largely as we move from mourning Queen Victoria to the death of her son and heir, Edward VII.As the girls mature with the changing times, Maude's mother becomes involved with the Suffragettes and this is viewed from the many viewpoints of Chevalier's wonderful characters.A wonderful book and brilliant audio CD. Recommended.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I like her more for her descriptions of the era than for her plots-sometimes they are a little poorly executed.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Library book club pick.
    I liked this more than I thought I would. The writing isn't amazing, but the characters were interesting, and at the end I wanted it to keep going. It was melodramatic, but in a satisfying way.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book - probably the best Chevalier I've read.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The story is set in Edwardian London between 1901 and 1910 and follows the interconnected worlds of two families. The Waterhouses are a conventional middle-class family and the Colemans are from a more privileged class. The two daughters from these families, Lavinia Waterhouse and Maude Coleman, become friends despite their differences. Maude's mother Kitty sits at the heart of the novel. She's dissatisfied with her life and eventually gets involved with the Suffragette movement.Chevalier rotates the narrative between the many characters, giving the reader a chance to see how everyone is affected by the decisions of others. Though the plot sounds simple enough, it's the characters I became attached to. Through their eyes we learn about the power of friendship, love, class distinctions, neglectful parenting, and so much more. It's by far my favorite from Chevalier.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A superb author and a great, heart wrenching story.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    10/06/07-11/06/07Unlike Chevalier’s Girl With A Pearl Earring I could not put this book down. Written from the perspectives of the members of two families, their servants, friends and ‘the gravedigger’s son’ the book memorably evokes the atmosphere of middle-class Victorian London. The subjects raised range from attitudes to sex, children, womens’ suffrage, age and death. The plot intricately weaves through the lives of the families, drawing on current issues and events, highlighting the rapidity of changing attitudes and mores at the beginning of C20.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Set among the sweeping skirts and social upheavals of Edwardian London, the central characters are two young girls of the same age, whose family plots are situated side-by-side in a cemetery. Lavinia Waterhouse is respectably middle-class, devoted, like her conventional, doting mother, to the right way to do things, although suspiciously well- schooled in subjects like funerary sculpture and the English practices of mourning. Her friend Maude Coleman comes from a slightly more privileged and free-thinking background. In contrast with Lavinia's mother, Maude's mother Kitty Coleman is well-educated by the standards of the day, and it has made her restless and irritable. But neither her reading, nor her gardening, nor her affair with the somber, high-thinking governor of the cemetery is enough for Kitty. She comes alive only when she discovers the women's suffrage movement, and her devotion to the cause takes her away from Maude in every sense. Disaster occurs when Lavinia and Maude attend a women’s suffrage march. What follows is the breakdown of relationships and families
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Falling Angels is a historical fiction which takes place in Victorian England. Because the main character is a child, the explanations for Victorian burial and mourning customs make sense. This also allows the reader to "see" more as a child. A child can get into places and overhear conversations that an adult would be hard pressed to accomplish. Falling Angels also includes information about the women's suffrage movement in England which is quiet different from the light portrayal in Mary Poppins.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Victorians were obsessed with death and sex. This book opens with the death of Queen Victoria, and ends with the death of King Edward, placing it squarely in Edwardian times, but the Victorian obsessions of death and sex are the two themes of this novel, pushing and pulling each other forward to modern times or back towards the Victorian age.The book follows two rival families sharing adjacent cemetery plots and who eventually become next door neighbors. The two little girls become friends, the fathers play cricket and go to pubs together, but the mothers are constantly comparing themselves to the other in every way.Through the point of view of all of the different family members, servants, and the gravedigger's son, the nature of the families' friendship and rivalry is uncovered. This style of shifting 1st person narration was very effective for this book. With headings indicate who was writing, it was never confusing, and the plot unfolded itself slowly and beautifully as motivations for past actions others observed became clear.Death surrounded these families. The girls were just old enough to understand death when Queen Victoria died. They live next door to the cemetery and visit their family plots. They learn how to mourn. They live in the shadow of death every day.Sex was ever present as well: the wife that turned her husband away; the husband that went to wife swapping parties; sexual escapades with men who work at the graveyard, and the consequences of those actions. Sexual roles were explored as well, as men are told to handle their woman as one handles a horse, and an accidental encounter with a leading suffragette leads one of the wives deep into that movement.Eventually, the families become too entangled with each other and with the Suffragette movement so that even the smallest things that these rivals and friends do will have unintended and drastic consequences.This was an excellent novel.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    An interesting portrayal of Victorian times, a good, solid read.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A favorite even though it's been awhile since I read it. I love the part about cemeteries being more for the living than the dead! I'd never looked at it that way before reading this book.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This was a pretty good book with historical insight into post-Victorian England and the early days of the Women's Suffrage Movement. Interesting, multi-dimensional characters with depth, intrigue, secrets, and human imperfections who grow and change over time, for better and for worse.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Falling Angels is Tracy Chevalier's (author of Girl With a Pearl Earring) glimpse into a changing English society during the decade between the deaths of Queen Victoria and King Edward VII. Through the lens of turn-of-the-century funerary tradition, she tells the stories of two neighboring families during this decade in which both progress and changing morals and values caused much controversy.The Coleman family and the Waterhouse family have adjacent cemetery plots and the reader quickly learns the differences between the two groups. The well-to-do, free-thinking Colemans have placed an elegant urn over their plot while the conventional Waterhouses have chosen a more sentimental angel. Although the families are quite different, they quickly find themselves true neighbors and their daughters, Maude Coleman and Lavinia (Livy) Waterhouse, become best friends.Chevalier has a knack for intimating the voices of her characters. The story is told in a chronological fashion by each of the characters, including at times the cook, maid and gravedigger. Change and grief are explored, but more interesting are the resulting attitudes and desires that arise.At its core, this is a novel about women, young and old. Some deal with change by grasping at tradition while others embrace new movements, such as women's suffrage. Despite their different characteristics and approaches, all eventually must travel the through the same turmoil and despair to get to the other side of the decade.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Changes are happing at the turn of the century, 1900. Might be a little depressing.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I finished the book in one day without even noticing it. Yet the story wasn't much to my liking. On the plus side, it is very easy to read.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Two families come together through their daughters whose families own adjoining plots in a cemetery. Great look at the class differences also- one family is lower-middle and one family is upper-middle. It takes on changes in the nation, women's sufferage, and the importance of beliefs.