Angel Diary

My opinion of the series

Hi everyone, today I’m taking a look at Angel Diary. The pitch is as follows:

Dong-Young is a royal daughter of heaven, betrothed to the King of Hell. Determined to escape her fate, she runs away before the wedding. The four guardians of heaven are ordered to find the angel princess. She’s hiding out on planet Earth, disguised as a boy.

This is a cute gender-bending tale, a romantic comedy/fantasy book about an angel, the King of Hell, and four super-powered chaperons...

So what exactly is this? Well, if you’ve read Demon Diary, which is a series by the same authors, you probably know roughly what you’re in for here: a bunch of fantasy characters hang out together, then there’s lots of politics, then they all live happily every after.

In Demon Diary my two main problems were that the story wasn’t put together very well, and the fact that half of the main cast were just allowed to get away with hanging out with a Demon Lord without being killed horribly completely broke my suspension of disbelief.

But as soon as I started reading Angel Diary, the first thing that struck me was - ah! Look at all of the characters! They’re all so cute!

Ahem, sorry, but this is something written by the Kara team that we’re talking about here.

However the second thing that struck me, was that their writing and general story-planning has improved greatly. Most of the main characters in Angel Diary have their own motivations which are woven into the story, rather than just having half the cast randomly show up. The rules for both the fantasy kingdoms and the magical powers used by the characters seem to have been sketched out ahead of time and are as simple as the plot allows; making the number of annoying magic-based random plot twists that we run into here far fewer than the number that we saw in Demon Diary. I’d say that their writing is getting serious now, though this is still a Kara story and as such is still quite lighthearted.

That was pretty much my opinion for the first half of the series, anyway. Unfortunately in the latter half of the series’ run I felt at least a little bit disappointed. Despite lots of improvement, Angel Diary still isn’t perfect. Kara have made plenty of mistakes; most are too small to mention but one that I do think is worth highlighting is that the outcome of the series isn’t quite as exciting as the both the concept and the quality of the opening volumes lead us to expect.

A lot of the characters that were so lovingly crafted early on get sidelined towards the end because no-one actually wrote them a place of any importance in the plot. Concepts such as demons, heaven and hell, all of which sounded impressive early on in the book in absentia, are all somewhat tame, lifeless and shallow when we actually get to see them in the series.

But that’s looking at it negatively. The positive way to look at it would be to say that Kara have improved a lot in their pacing and storytelling since Demon Diary. If you enjoyed that series - and I think most people did despite it feeling a little amateur - then you’re going to enjoy this one just as much. It’s just as charming, but defiantly does not feel amateur.