Angelfire by Courtney Allison Moulton

I absolutely love this cover...

This debut, the first novel in a trilogy, is achingly romantic, terrifying, and filled with blistering action.

When seventeen-year-old Ellie starts seeing reapers - monstrous creatures who devour humans and send their souls to Hell - she finds herself on the front lines of a supernatural war between archangels and the Fallen and faced with the possible destruction of her soul.

A mysterious boy named Will reveals she is the reincarnation of an ancient warrior, the only one capable of wielding swords of angelfire to fight the reapers, and he is an immortal sworn to protect her in battle. Now that Ellie's powers have been awakened, a powerful reaper called Bastian has come forward to challenge her. He has employed a fierce assassin to eliminate her - an assassin who has already killed her once.

While balancing her dwindling social life and reaper-hunting duties, she and Will discover Bastian is searching for a dormant creature believed to be a true soul reaper. Bastian plansto use this weapon to ignite the End of Days and to destroy Ellie's soul, ending her rebirth cycle forever. Now, she must face an army of Bastian's most frightening reapers, prevent the soul reaper from consuming her soul, and uncover the secrets of her past lives - including truths that may be too frightening to remember

Overall, I thought it was good. I was at no point enthralled by this book. It is very slow in the beginning, leaving huge concepts not described to the reader, so I felt like I didn't know what was going on. It picked up in the middle but plateaued for me until the end. I thought the concept of Ellie being this immortal, bad-ass, demon fighting teen was great - I love love stories but I love bad ass heroines.

I was intrigued by the building tension between Will and Ellie. He's all stoic and trying to stay duty bound and then there is Ellie, tempting him and I LOVE THEIR FIRST KISS. I'm hoping that in the second one, we discover more about Will (Nathaniel and Caden too) because they don't seem real to me yet.

I may be crazy when it comes to fight scenes, but when your story is about one girl, obviously Ellie in this case, and she is in a ton of battles, there is no suspense for me because she is the main character, the author isn't going to kill her off in Chapter 7. I didn't feel there was an element of: "OMG I hope she makes it!" I get why the scenes were in there though - the author had to develop that she was getting her skills back and becoming bad-ass, but I felt I could skim those pages.

LOVE LOVE LOVE the culture and background of the story...If it's true, this author did a ton of pre-leg work for the book!!!!

One quick thought:

Ellie's dad -something is way up with him besides a mean streak