When the Angels Left the Old Country review
Full disclosure: I won this book in a giveaway, so I feel like I'm morally obligated to write a public review instead of just talking to people in real life about it. You are free to view me as an unpaid shill, or a shill who has been paid with one (1) book.
A little background on my perspective: I am Jewish, but not very good at it and I have extremely strong feelings on Good Omens going back more than 20 years. I have cosplayed Aziraphale more than once like 10 years ago. I looked up a whole lot of Yiddish words before I realized there's a glossary in the back, so learn from my mistakes.
Overall, I enjoyed this book and was sad when it started wrapping up! If the idea of a Good Omens / Fievel: An American Tail crossover sounds like a good time to you, you will probably enjoy this book.
It's a very quick and engaging read, but I happened to start reading it right before the latest round of internet discourse on antisemitism, which made for a fairly distressing combination and a solid day of Jewish navel-gazing in the middle.
It starts a little slow, both plot-wise and genre-wise, but picks up in the second half. By genre-wise, I mean that there were long sections of the book where I could practically forget that two-thirds of the main cast were supernatural creatures. Yes, they talked about it, but after a short burst in the beginning, they basically don't do anything with it until the second half of the book. Even with more going on in the latter half, this is a very low magic book, so don't expect a Good Omens level of miracles and major supernatural characters outside of the main pair. Yes, they do exist, but this is a much smaller scale story. This isn't a bad thing, it's just different and I want to set the correct expectations.
Also speaking of expectations, this is much more a Jewish story than it is a queer one. Yes, there are baby lesbians and what is technically a non-binary character (though I feel that a being that doesn't have a sex to begin with is a very different, less queer thing than someone who is born into the presumption of having a sex and gender). Now I am wholeheartedly in favor of stories where the focus is not being queer, the characters just happen to be queer people and the plot does not revolve around their identities, so this was fine. But if you're expecting a romance focus, this doesn't really have one beyond the bog standard "at the end of the narrative, the people who seem compatible get together". Yes, the angel and demon are devoted to each other and the story treats that as very important, but I've seen a thousand stories where the same level of devotion could be played completely platonically as well.
To quibble, there are some inconsistences, where the author forgot something they'd said earlier or else made changes during writing and didn't go back and bring some other things in line, as well as some things that aren't adequately explained in my opinion, but they didn't detract much beyond occasionally breaking me out of immersion to scratch my head and go right back to reading. It could perhaps have used another editing pass, but it's far from a major problem.
Very mild spoilers with my opinions on the main characters below:
