As a whole, i throughly enjoyed Brown's Angels and Demons. I found once the plot took off, I had a hard time putting the story down. Although Brown is critically acclaimed for writing his novels for movies, he does have the ability to create a novel that is a real page-turner. The ending was filled with twists and turns that made for a lot of suspense for me, the reader. For example Janus, supposedly the head of the Illuminati and the man behind the threats to the Vatican, was actually the Camerlengo who was the temporary head of the Catholic Church inside the Vatican. Also the Illuminati diamond was described as a diamond that would “stop all in amazement at the sight of it”. However the Illuminati diamond wasn't actually physically a diamond but a ambigram of the words Earth, Air, Fire and Water in the shape of a diamond. On the contrary, there are a couple negative aspects of Angels and Demons; such as Brown's poor sentence structure and the exaggerated truths that fill the pages of the novel. Firstly, at the height of a tense part in the novel Brown always seemed to shorten he is sentence to a few short words. This made for choppy or rough reading for the reader. Moreover, all the facts of the Illuminati are made to seem so real and at the end of the novel the reader is left sitting there disappointed knowing that everything Brown has said in the last 700 pages was untrue. In conclusion, overall Angels and Demons is similar to a uncut diamond, spectacular but yet rough around the edges.
