<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"  Angels are mysterious creatures that have captivated us for many centuries. CBS can attest to that: For nine seasons, their heavenly hit, Touched by an Angel, brought God&amp;#039;s messengers into our living rooms. For more than a decade, celestial know-it-all Doreen Virtue has been in the business of making angel therapy available to the masses\u2014and if you&amp;#039;re looking for guidance from your absent angel, Virtue&amp;#039;s Connecting with Your Angels Kit, available for $15.99 a pop, can assist. (In case you&amp;#039;re wondering, it includes a rose-quartz crystal, a white candle, incense, and Dead Sea bath salts, among other things). It gets better. At the Oscars this past March 7, Miley Cyrus&amp;#039; mother debuted a pair of freshly-inked wing tattoos on her back. Perhaps our fascination with these &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; angels has gotten out of hand.  But what if these creatures aren&amp;#039;t just illuminating messengers from God? What if instead there were a community of blue-blooded angel-human hybrids living among us? Enter Danielle Trussoni&amp;#039;s Angelology (Viking), out this week. This novel offers a much-needed fresh take on a subject that&amp;#039;s drowning in copycats, goo-goo eyes, and pink-ribboned kitsch. This time, the angels aren&amp;#039;t playing nice.  Trussoni begins her debut novel at a convent in Milton, New York, with 23-year-old nun Evangeline, whose duties are to guard Saint Rose Convent&amp;#039;s archive collection and sort mail. Days before the new millennium, Evangeline receives a letter from a certain V.A. Verlaine. He and his client request permission to view the archives at the convent in hopes of uncovering a particular but brief correspondence between the late heiress Abigail Aldrich Rockefeller and a former abbess at the convent.  Verlaine&amp;#039;s client is none other than Percival Grigori, a monstrously heartless and elitist Nephilim\u2014offspring of angels and humans mentioned in the Bible&amp;#039;s Book of Genesis and Book of Numbers. Like all Nephilim, Percival has an immortal state of mind, but a degenerative disorder is playing havoc on his wings, once &amp;quot;full and strong and bowed like golden scimitars.&amp;quot; After 10 years of the disease, his wings have disintegrated and are merely &amp;quot;blue and raw&amp;quot; nubs. Percival believes Mrs. Rockefeller&amp;#039;s correspondence with the convent will uncover the hiding place of Orpheus&amp;#039; lyre. The ethereal and enchanting music produced from plucking the silk strings of this lyre is said to cause one to &amp;quot;go mad from bliss.&amp;quot; Percival believes this magical music will not only cure his disease but will instantly restore the Nephilim&amp;#039;s diminishing power in the world. This soulless and dying Nephilim has, perhaps, more in common with his eternal enemies at the Society of Angelologists than just a musical relic. His fear of death and his desire for more time makes him far more human-like than he would care to admit.  Trussoni time-travels back 50-plus years to a Parisian angelology academy where we are introduced to two 15-year-old girls. Celestine is tall, pale, and on scholarship, while Gabriella is dark, beautiful, and from a prestigious family of angelologists. They share a friendship, a rivalry, and a desire to &amp;quot;search for the cave of the imprisoned angels,&amp;quot; which is speculated to be the resting place of the treasured lyre. According to Trussoni&amp;#039;s interpretation of Genesis 6, God imprisoned these fallen angels for procreating with human females and creating the Nephilim community. It is here in Paris that the secret society of angelology is explored, the vengeance of the Nephilim is felt, and the power of a secret affair changes the path of life for both Celestine and Gabriella.  Trussoni ends her first book of angels in the final days of 1999. Evangeline, Verlaine, and a group of angelologists (who seem to have come out of the woodwork just for this mission) partake in an Amazing Race-esque adventure around New York City for the by-now-infamous musical holy grail that ultimately and irrevocably alters the course of Evangeline&amp;#039;s existence.  Trussoni&amp;#039;s acclaimed memoir, Falling Through the Earth, was named one of The New York Times&amp;#039; Ten Best Books of 2006 and won ELLE&amp;#039;s own monthly Reader&amp;#039;s Prize in April of that year. Angelology is taking a much more commercial route and has the potential to be the next National-Treasure-meets-The-Da-Vinci-Code-meets-the-Twilight-Saga big deal when it hits the silver screen\u2014treasure hunting through New York City and Bulgaria&amp;#039;s Rhodope Mountains with mass amounts of angel-morphing in 3D sounds like a pot of Hollywood gold. Trussoni&amp;#039;s Angelology is a fantastical thriller. Her lyrical imagery and conflation of biblical lore and mythology is escapism done right. I spoke with Trussoni about Angelology, what&amp;#039;s behind her fascination with angels, the bidding wars that erupted over the rights for this novel, the likelihood that angels could be the new vampires, and Angelology, the movie.  ELLE:  Your first book was a memoir about growing up with a father who was a tunnel rat in the Vietnam War and the rough childhood you lived as a result. After Falling Through the Earth, Angelology was definitely a surprise first novel. What inspired you to write about this secret society of angelologists and the blue-blooded angels they are trying to rid the world of?  Danielle Trussoni:  I think a lot of people were surprised that I went so far away from my first book with my second. I always knew I wanted to write really imaginative fiction\u2014fiction that was very different from my real life. It had always been my intention to write this kind of novel. A memoir is different in so many ways. It&amp;#039;s just really freeing to go on and do something so different.  ELLE:  Your website says: &amp;quot;Through tireless undercover research Danielle has infiltrated the angelologists&amp;#039; inner circle.&amp;quot; Can you tell me about the research you conducted for this novel?  DT:  I did a lot of research. My favorite part was when I went to a convent. There is an adoration chapel there where the nuns all go and pray hourly. I was able to sit in that chapel with them. It was really just amazing, and it helped me visualize the setting for my book. One night after I was sitting in the chapel, I was walking back to my room and ended up in their library. This particular convent had lots and lots of information about angels, so I just sat down and started reading. By the end of the night, I knew I would use angels as the centerpiece of the book. And that brought me to this whole world of angel research. It sounds a little bit strange. People don&amp;#039;t actually think there is such a thing out there as angel research. Since the Middle Ages, people have been writing about angels. Angelology was actually at one point a scholastic discipline. I also really enjoyed going back and discovering more about angels and the history of angelology.  ELLE:  What form of angelology still exists today?  DT:  I don&amp;#039;t think there are actually any theologians practicing angelology or studying angels anymore, but it&amp;#039;s definitely in a lot of religious literature. It&amp;#039;s still out there, and people are still interested. Even in the more secular way, books about angels are everywhere.   ELLE:  I read on bookpage.com that you&amp;#039;ve always been fascinated with angels. As a little girl, you said you often found yourself &amp;quot;gazing at the angels painted throughout the church&amp;quot; that you attended. What fascinated you about angels then?   DT:  When I was little, I went to a Catholic school and was required to go to church every morning and with my parents on Sundays, so I spent a lot of time sitting on a wooden pew. Angels are sort of a relief. If you&amp;#039;re looking around, the other imagery is so dark and heavy. Looking at the beautifully rendered pictures of angels was more uplifting.  ELLE:  How has your fascination changed since Angelology? DT:  I think I have a much more historical interest and an artistic understanding of them now. I think that as a child I was really sort of overwhelmed with the question of what those creatures really were. As I&amp;#039;ve done research for the book, I&amp;#039;ve found\u2014obviously it&amp;#039;s a fantastical element in all of this\u2014that it is amazing how historically present angels are in the world. It was also really wonderful to be able to go and look at Renaissance art and see how different artists have represented angels over the years.  ELLE:  Your great aunt Drusilla is a Franciscan Sister of Adoration at Saint Rose Convent in Wisconsin. Have any of the nuns read Angelology? What kind of reaction are you expecting from them?  DT:  Someone from the convent requested a book, so I&amp;#039;m assuming someone has read it there. I&amp;#039;m not sure which of the nuns, if any, have read it. I don&amp;#039;t know what their reaction will be. It&amp;#039;s so clearly not their convent, and it&amp;#039;s so clearly not their world that I think they&amp;#039;ll just read it as any other reader will. Although they might be interested in the details because they were taken from their convent, and they might be interested to see how I&amp;#039;ve transposed the real thing into fiction.  ELLE:  How long ago did you go there and do this research?  DT:  January of 2007.  ELLE:  Is your great aunt still living at the convent?  DT:  She&amp;#039;s still there.    ELLE:  Angelology has been compared to Dan Brown&amp;#039;s The Da Vinci Code. His books have created a lot of controversy. Do you anticipate that similar controversy will materialize due to your conflation of biblical lore and mythology?  DT:  There&amp;#039;s always a chance that it could. It wasn&amp;#039;t my intention when writing this to do that. From what I&amp;#039;ve seen, if there is a point that excites a lot of people in either direction, positive or negative, then people might jump on it and start debating it. I think this book is so clearly fantasy on so many levels that it would be difficult for religious groups to actually get upset. That&amp;#039;s just my opinion, but you never know.   ELLE:  For a couple of decades, angels have been portrayed as kind of our spiritual teddy bears. Why did you decide to make your blue-blooded angels the villains in this novel?   DT:  When I started to do this angel research, what fascinated me was this subset, this little group of angels called Nephilim. Those are the blue-blooded angels you&amp;#039;re referring to. They are descended from a group of angels, if you take this passage [Genesis 6] from the Bible to be the starting point of this group of angels called the Watchers. Their parents were a group of angels that disobeyed orders. They were castaways and were considered evil. So I was interested in this one group of evil angels. That became so much more interesting to me than this fluffy, Hallmark-card type of angel that you see most anywhere. And actually, this is when the subject became viable to me.   ELLE:  Were you apprehensive at all about making these angels, who a lot of people believe to be our guardians or messengers from God, evil? DT:  No, I wasn&amp;#039;t. If people start pulling away the stereotypes of what angels are instead of these fluffy, teddy-bear kinds of angels, then they&amp;#039;ll see, historically, that they were terrifying in some depictions. In the Bible, from what I remember, often the reaction to angels is one of terror. Even the good angels, I think, would inspire in humans some sort of fear. I wanted to take this one group that was clearly negative and bring them into the contemporary world. I thought it was actually a good counterpoint to the good angels. Also, in the book, it&amp;#039;s very clear that there are both, the good and the bad. I think it&amp;#039;s interesting to have the opposite side. I think it would get a little boring if I had a novel just about good angels.  ELLE:  I&amp;#039;ve never read a book about evil angels. DT:  I hadn&amp;#039;t either. I found when I was doing the research that at first it was frustrating because I wasn&amp;#039;t able to find a lot of material. I had to go back into the library and pull things out.   ELLE:  What do you think Abigail Aldrich Rockefeller would think of this treasure-hunting adventure and this battle of good and evil that you&amp;#039;ve included her in?  DT:  That&amp;#039;s a good question. I have no idea. She was primarily a patron of the arts, so in that capacity I think she would support a piece of art that uses her in it. Second, this is definitely a work of fiction. Although I did a lot of research on Abigail Rockefeller, her character is a fictitious one, and her actions in the book are fictitious. There is sort of an adoration of Abigail Rockefeller by the characters in the book. Everyone is so appreciative of the institutions she created in New York, so I think that&amp;#039;s one part of the book that really pays tribute to her. For me, the reasoning behind using her was really because I wanted to have locations that were very iconic in New York, and her family was a part of so much in New York City, and it just offers a great opportunity.  ELLE:  Falling Through the Earth was named one of the Ten Best Books of 2006 by the New York Times Book Review. Did you feel added pressure when writing Angelology due to your memoir&amp;#039;s success and popularity? DT:  Of course, but on the other hand, I think of it as reinventing the wheel with every book. You have to start over, as if you&amp;#039;ve never written a book before, and I think that&amp;#039;s why Angelology is so different from Falling Through the Earth. I put that on the shelf and said, &amp;quot;Okay, it&amp;#039;s over, I can&amp;#039;t write that book again.&amp;quot; I wanted to do something completely and totally different. I think of it as, there is a book you&amp;#039;re born to write, and there&amp;#039;s one that you make. Falling Through the Earth was definitely something I was born to write because it was my life. I had been trying to write that story in different manifestations for 10 years before I published it. There was no way that I could do fiction that was even remotely similar.  ELLE:  The New York Times and Chicago Tribune have not been so kind to Angelology. The Janet Maslin review in the New York Times said &amp;quot;the book is neck deep in mumbo jumbo&amp;quot; and that it&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;so prettily written that it takes a while for the clumsiness to show.&amp;quot; The Chicago Tribune said, &amp;quot;Only the most diehard fans of pretentious supernatural thrillers will want more of this silly story.&amp;quot; DT:  I haven&amp;#039;t read these reviews. ELLE:  You don&amp;#039;t read reviews at all?    DT:  I do, but I get warning. I have people read them first and let me know, I mean it&amp;#039;s not good for me to read those. There&amp;#039;s no point to it, really, in helping me feel positive about the book or to write the next one.   ELLE:  Do you plan to tweak your next novel in any way now that you&amp;#039;ve heard this criticism?  DT:  No, absolutely not. Actually, the other reviews have been so overwhelming positive that these two reviews are really in the minority. I don&amp;#039;t know if you&amp;#039;ve read the People review or the cover of the New York Times Book Review that was published last Sunday. They were so overwhelmingly positive, and the prepublication reviews were, all four of them, raves. It&amp;#039;s been sold in 32 countries, and it&amp;#039;s being published all over the world. I&amp;#039;ve had nothing but positive responses from those editors, so two negative reviews is nothing. I think those reviewers don&amp;#039;t want to buy into that world. It&amp;#039;s not their thing. So maybe that&amp;#039;s why, but I can&amp;#039;t really speculate. I think it would make for a schizophrenic second book if I were to take all the criticism and praise that I&amp;#039;m getting and put it in one book. It would just be all over the place.  ELLE:  According to Publishers Weekly, there was a &amp;quot;bidding war among seven houses&amp;quot; for Angelology. This experience must have been overwhelming. What was it like having publishers and editors passionately fight over the rights to publish this novel when not so long ago you, like so many other writers, were just desperately trying to get your work published? DT:  It was really wonderful. There was also a bidding war with my first book. It wasn&amp;#039;t as big, but it wasn&amp;#039;t difficult to publish my first book, either. But this one was completely overwhelming. I had no idea there would be so much interest. It was really reaffirming, and then the movie rights, maybe three days after the book, sold. It was just really wonderful. It was such a gift. ELLE:  There was also a reported bidding war among Hollywood studios to turn this book into a movie. When you first started writing this book, did you ever imagine the book would receive so much attention from Hollywood executives? DT:  No, that was not on my mind at all. I&amp;#039;m of course overwhelmingly happy. When I started writing this, my mind was wholly in this as a book, and making it the best novel that it could be. It&amp;#039;s a longish book, and so it will change dramatically and be a totally new thing when it&amp;#039;s a movie. But I&amp;#039;m thrilled that it will be, and I&amp;#039;m so glad that it&amp;#039;s going to be out there.  ELLE:  What do you say to critics who say you&amp;#039;ve sold out to Hollywood with this million-dollar deal? DT:  Well the movie deal happened after I wrote the book, so it&amp;#039;s impossible to say that. They came to me after the book was written.   ELLE:  How much involvement will you have regarding the direction of the film? DT:  I don&amp;#039;t think I will be involved. I completely trust Will Smith&amp;#039;s Overbrook Entertainment. He and Marc Forster are doing this together. I&amp;#039;ve spoken a little bit with the director, Forster, and a little bit with the screenwriter, Michael Goldenberg, and I trust what they&amp;#039;re doing completely. It looks great. I think if there are too many cooks in the kitchen, the dish is not going to work out, so I think it&amp;#039;s better for me to just stay back and let them do what they do best. I&amp;#039;ll go write another book\u2014that&amp;#039;s what I love to do.  ELLE:  Some people have said that angels just might be the next vampires. What&amp;#039;s your take on this? DT:  I think angels definitely offer all the imaginative possibilities that vampires do, and I think they&amp;#039;ve actually been popular in Western culture for longer than vampires have been. I hope they become a part of the culture again in a new way. ELLE:  You created these characters; who in Hollywood do you think could bring them to life in the movie Angelology? DT:  Good question. I haven&amp;#039;t really thought much about it, but I have a lot of characters that are French. One woman, named Gabriella\u2014I&amp;#039;d love for Marion Cotillard to play her.  ELLE:  You&amp;#039;re currently working on the sequel to Angelology. What can we expect?  DT:  I haven&amp;#039;t actually started writing yet. I&amp;#039;m in the planning stages. The next book is about Evangeline and Verlaine, and it&amp;#039;s a love story. It&amp;#039;s about Evangeline coming to grips with who she is in a lot of ways.  ELLE:  How many books do you plan to write for this series?  DT:  It really depends. One thing that I don&amp;#039;t ever want to do is write something I don&amp;#039;t love. Angelology was so fun for me and such a pleasure to write. I love the characters so much. The next one is going to be just as fun. If the third one feels like it&amp;#039;s going to be fun, then I&amp;#039;ll do it, and if not, then I&amp;#039;ll do something different.   ELLE:  Do you suggest readers visit your website Angelologist.com before diving into this book?  DT:  Please. I hope that they do. There is nothing that&amp;#039;s going to spoil the book on the website. There is also this little course that is on the site\u2014if readers sign up, I&amp;#039;ll mail them a certificate and a bookplate with my signature. It&amp;#039;s really fun. This website will help people navigate the story in some ways, and it gives a lot of background information about the individual characters, too. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/books/reviews/a10963/book-release-angelology-436217/?src=global_footer>