Unearthly

Cynthia Hand’s Unearthly, the first novel in her larger series of the same name, follows thirteen-year-old Clara Gardner, who learns that she and her brother and mother are angel-human hybrids. Their angelic heritage gives them various powers that come with a responsibility to protect humans. When Clara has a strange dream about a young man in a forest fire, she seeks out and saves Christian Prescott, watching over him thereafter. Along her journey to understand her heritage, she befriends another angel-blood, Angela Zerbino, and two siblings, Wendy and Tucker Avery. As she falls in love with both Christian and Tucker, Clara learns that a tribe of fallen angels has waged war against the angels. Juggling problems that exist at the levels of both self and society, she struggles to find her true purpose on Earth.

A dorky but beautiful young girl, who fits in relatively well at school despite her quirks, Clara is admired by her peers for always seeming down to earth. At the novel’s beginning, she deals with typical daily teenage woes, but lives a relatively comfortable life, feeling that she already comprehends most of the obstacles that are intrinsic to adolescence. At school, she becomes infatuated with Christian Prescott, a handsome boy who soon becomes the subject of a dream in which a boy whose identity she cannot make out is standing in a cluster of trees encroached upon by a raging forest fire.

After Clara experiences the vision, she rushes to rescue him, realizing it is Christian. In the aftermath, she reckons with her growing affection for him, as well as what it means to have her powers of foresight. Soon, she learns that many of the destructive forces in the world are created by a troop of fallen angels called the Black Wings. In their seemingly eternal feud, the good angels and the Black Wings fight to turn the tide of good and evil in the world on behalf of heaven and hell. Having taken her status for granted, Clara realizes that the process of becoming an angel involves attention to actions and values in addition to the use of one’s inherited powers.



One day, Clara meets Wendy and Tucker, two siblings living in a rural area. She falls for Tucker, a young cowboy figure, admiring his rough and candid personality. Valuing both Tucker and Christian, but in different ways, she has difficulty choosing one over the other. When Tucker and Wendy are endangered by the Black Wings, Clara rushes to their aid, helped by Angela Zerbino, another girl with angel blood. After saving them, she realizes that falling in love with Tucker is the best choice because he helps ground her to the earth rather than pursue an ideal far removed from reality.

At the end of Unearthly, Clara has a better grasp on her identity, not only accepting her status as part divine figure and learning how to utilize her powers but also accepting her status as a mortal teenager. The novel suggests that both types of knowledge go hand in hand and that a good life is constructed holistically through attentiveness to both the inherited and the created self. Ultimately, Clara resolves to take growing up a day at a time while learning also what it means to be selfless and compassionate.