Sequel to 'The Vintner's Luck': the angel, Xas, is now working in 1920’s Hollywood amongst the pioneers of film making, a thinly disguised Howard Hawks and Howard Hughes among them, whilst trying to elude his brother, Lucifer, and to save his friend Flora from her own mortality. An extraordinary work. ( )

With Knox’s fiction, I find myself having to stop and think about the weight of things. She will introduce characters, words, symbols, and twine them all together so subtly that I frequently find myself asking, what is the import of this? What does it mean? I have to be in literary analysis mode as well as readership mode, because things often have more than one meaning, and will usually contribute to an overall picture that is grander than you originally expect...Not easy, and perhaps not what I originally expected, but nevertheless a highly recommended read. [ full review on my bloghref> ] ( )

Disappointed in this . Loved The Vintner's Luck. Hollywood setting left me cold. ( )

Review by Crisetta MacLeod

What can an angel do when he loses his wings? Xas tries to stay in the air by becoming a stunt flyer in the early days of both Hollywood’s film industry and of aviation. He becomes involved with an equally maimed human, Flora McLeod, and finally becomes voluntarily earthbound in order to rear her child. She had been an early Hollywood starlet, until a stupid prank burned away her beauty and her career, leaving her in constant pain.

Set in the 1920’s, this is a credible and engrossing re-creation of the early days of silent movies and aviation. In a Faster than Light Podcast interview, Elizabeth Knox explains how she changes the names of her main characters (such as the identifiable Howard Hughes) but retains contemporary fictitious characters created by Scott Fitzgerald. A sequel is promised! Itself a sequel to the bestseller The Vintner’s Cut, soon to be released as a film, Knox reckons The Angel’s Cut “persecuted her” until she was forced to write it, despite interruptions from other novels in between. Read this one, see the film, get caught up in a fallen angel’s moral dilemmas!

http://tamaranth.blogspot.com/2009/07/53-angels-cut-elizabeth-knox.html ( )