Angels and Demons

I read the book Angels and Demons by Dan Brown. This book was published in
2000, and published by POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. It has 569 pages. It is classified as a mystery and an action book. Angels and Demons was truly a terrifying read and yet impossible to stop. It had scenes where it was scary, and I did not want to read, but there was nothing that could be done to pry me away from the book. Then there were scenes that made me unable to put the book down because it was well written. “He stared up in terror at the dark figure looming over him.” What do you want?!” (Prologue) Even though it was only the beginning it had already hooked me in. Dan Brown created a world, and in which, seemed almost like reality, I forgot more than twice that Angels and Demons is a book and not real life. He created it so vividly that I could see what was happening in the story. Angels and Demons is about one woman’s revenge, a man’s pursue of his life’s work, and the world at the mercy of one person.

Angels and Demons is a book about a man named Robert Langdon and a woman named Vittoria Vetra. Vittoria Vetra is an adopted daughter to a scientist. Then on one unfortunate day, Leonardo Vetra was killed and branded. The group that claimed responsibility is a notorious group of people who call themselves the Illuminati. However, according to Robert Langdon the Illuminati had been gone for centuries. After Leonardo Vetra was killed, Robert Langdon became involved in this life threatening mystery. Vittoria Vetra was notified of her father’s death; she flew in and demanded to see his body. Maximilian Kohler denied her request. Maximilian Kohler, who hired Leonardo and Vittoria Vetra, asked her, “I need to know what you two were working on. I need you to take us to your lab!” (52). Leonardo and Vittoria Vetra were creating something so powerful that only a few grams were needed before being able to power a city for a week. This thing is known as antimatter. It could be a powerful weapon and destroy many lives, if in the wrong hand, or it could be used for something good, if in the right hand. There at the lab they found out that the murderer was looking for the antimatter, and he found what he was looking for. Robert Langdon and Vittoria Vetra flew to Rome, where they knew the antimatter to be, thanks to a phone call. Now Robert and Vittoria are responsible for more than one hundred lives. The Conclave was happening that day, and the four most popular cardinals were kidnapped. The killer said, “The first cardinal body appears at eight o’ clock. Then one every hour” (169). Langdon figured out that by using the Path of Illuminati they would be able to locate where the four cardinals would be branded and killed. Unfortunately they thought that because of time many of the landmarks that existed to guide them through the Path of Illuminati were now gone. Despite everything they would have to work as quickly and accurately as possible to find the cardinals before they are killed and find the antimatter before time runs out. If all fails, the world that they know would change completely.

The book Angels and Demons is an incredible book from the first word to the very end. The author introduced me to some new things that I never knew about. Some of the things include churches, paintings, or artworks. Some of them that he mentioned were the Pantheon and the Chigi Chapel. This book, though a mystery, has several scenes that I liked. I liked them because Dan Brown took his time in explaining every little detail, but not so much that I would get tired of it. He also made it seem realistic, “Langdon was falling again. Like enormous dominoes, the stacks began to topple, one after another. Metal on metal, books tumbling everywhere. Langdon held on as his inclined stack bounced downward like a ratchet on a jack…Suddenly, like a canon, the glass exploded” (347). Dan Brown used things that we know to explain things like in the quote above he used dominoes. He used dominoes because most people know what dominoes look like, and how easily they fall. He also changed which character was the main person of each chapter, and because of that he gave me different perspective of each character, how they were feeling and how they saw things. Some of the characters that he changed often were Robert Langdon, Vittoria Vetra, the assassin and the cardinals, sometimes. That was helpful because sometimes it made me change my mind about things. This book is also good because it showed me that not everything is what it seems. In this book a person who was an ally from the beginning was marked a traitor, and I believed after all it was done convincingly, then just a short while later he was deemed innocent, and then Dan Brown makes another person, who I thought to be a remarkable person, was considered the traitor.

In conclusion, Angels and Demons is easy to remember, and hard to forget. This book spoke for itself; every page was well written and every page filled with clues so well hidden I did not even notice it until the end. The author was sly and added clues where it seemed most boring and useless. He added them to parts that I, as a reader, skimmed through. He was excellent at making the clues themselves invisible to the readers. This book was addicting, and even when done it was difficult to put down.