Review! and Falling, Fly by Skyler White.

and Falling, Fly
Skyler White
Berkley Trade 
March 2, 2010 
ISBN-10: 0425232344 
ISBN-13: 978-0425232347

In a dark and seedy underground of burned-out rock stars and angels-turned- vampires, a revolutionary neuroscientist and a fallen angel must put medicine against mythology in an attempt to erase their tortured pasts...but at what price?   

Olivia, vampire and fallen angel of desire, is hopeless...and damned. Since the fall from Eden, she has hungered for love, but fed only on desire. Dominic O'Shaughnessy is a neuroscientist plagued by impossible visions. When his research and her despair collide at L'Otel Mathillide-a subterranean hell of beauty, demons, and dreams-rationalist and angel unite in a clash of desire and damnation that threatens to destroy them both. 

In this fractures Hotel of the Damned, Olivia and Dominic discover the only force consistent in their opposing realities is the deep, erotic gravity between them. Bound to each other finally in a knot of interwoven freedoms, Dominic and Olivia-the vision-touched scientist and the earth-bound angel, reborn and undead-encounter the mystery of love and find it is both fall...and flight.

In this dark fantasy novel, we meet Olivia. She's a vampire, a fallen angel of desire who can't feel any desire of her own. She feels hopeless and damned as she can't ever feel love or be loved. She can only feed on the desire of others who see her as they want, they don't see her. She's sick of it, sick of having to act human and decides to return home to the L'Otel Matillide. An underground hotel where angels and rockstars and demons come to be themselves.

There she meets Dominic O'Shaughnessy. He's a neuroscientist looking for a cure to his delusions and his quest has gotten him to the L'Otel. From the beginning, his rationality clashes with Olivia's damned existence. But no matter how much Olivia's desire and Dominic's logic battle against each other, their growing attraction brings them together and it might either mean their salvation, or their fall.

I have never read a book such as and Falling, Fly. It's an incredibly dark and sensual story of mythology and modernity clashing together. It's certainly in a class of its own! Olivia and Dominic are so similar yet absolute opposites. They both have hopes of being someone better yet one of them doesn't want hope and the other one starves for it. I both loved and hated them. I hated Olivia's damned self and how she had to feed to survive, I hated Dominic's logic and how utterly blinding it could be yet I could not stop reading their plight, I needed to know if they would get their happy ending, wanted or not.

While I did enjoy both Olivia and Dominic's story, and Falling, Fly is written in a very slow pace, and admittedly, at times I was bored. With that said, White's writing's unbelievably lyrical and haunting. It just comes right off the page and hooks the reader from the beginning. and Falling, Fly is a love story unlike any about a fallen angel and a scientist, two characters who will surprise you and will make you feel like anything is possible, even in Hell.

Lush Rating; 3!