I was a Jewish kid with a Catholic father, raised in a Baptist part of Texas, so I’ve grown up to have a pretty strong theological fascination, as well as an open interest in a wide range of religious narratives. What kinds of thrills and challenges would spring from such an unusual match? And what would her very over-protective parents think? When my mind started spinning around this mortal girl’s character, I had the feeling her love story had the power to be bigger, weightier, and with a lot more at stake than any romance-or really any thing-I’d ever written before. I started thinking about what it would be like to be normal girl-suddenly the object of an angel’s affection. I came across a biblical reference to a group of angels who were kicked out of heaven because they lusted after mortal women. And one day, flipping through the Book of Genesis, lightening struck. I was just a grad student who happened to write a lot of love stories, auditing a class about reading the Bible as a narrative text. And although it’s commercially compelling, I’m not interested in making a case for why angels are the new vampires. Going into this project, what I knew about angels started and ended with a very basic collective social construct: flawless features, fluffy wings, good intentions, etc.

I’ve never encountered an angel in my every day life-though I’d consider myself open to it (I say this after visiting Savannah, where I learned 80% of the residents are “open” to encountering a ghost). In an age where we’ve actually colloquialized the phrase “vampire-saturation,” where even Anne Rice is crossing over to the light side, and where-yes, I know-there’s no shortage of other angel books being published, it does feel important to trace back to the exact moment that I chose to plunge myself into the Miltonic fray. Why angels? More than any other question I’ve been asked since I started writing Fallen, this is what people want to know. By Lauren Kate, for The Children’s Book Review

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