Beautiful Darkness, by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl

 

Ethan Wate used to think of Gatlin, the small Southern town he had always called home, as a place where nothing ever changed. Then he met mysterious newcomer Lena Duchannes, who revealed a secret world that had been hidden in plain sight all along. A Gatlin that harbored ancient secrets beneath its moss-covered oaks and cracked sidewalks. A Gatlin where a curse has marked Lena's family of powerful Supernaturals for generations. A Gatlin where impossible, magical, life-altering events happen.

Sometimes life-ending.

Together they can face anything Gatlin throws at them, but after suffering a tragic loss, Lena starts to pull away, keeping secrets that test their relationship. And now that Ethan's eyes have been opened to the darker side of Gatlin, there's no going back. Haunted by strange visions only he can see, Ethan is pulled deeper into his town's tangled history and finds himself caught up in the dangerous network of underground passageways endlessly crisscrossing the South, where nothing is as it seems.

Beautiful Creatures ended on a perfect note-happy, but with foreshadowing of things not so happy to keep the reader coming back. Unlike Beautiful Creatures, Beautiful Darkness hopped off the ground right away and flung me into a part of its world I had never even heard of. Turns out the Caster world is a lot more than tunnels and old dangerous books, but as cool (and cliche) as it was, I felt as if it was a totally new series, and not a sequel because this mysterious world was not mentioned once in Creatures. (This is not a good thing-it's supposed to be a continuation, not a whole new story.)

Beautiful Darkness also introduced two new characters, Liv and John. Liv is a British student interning with Marian at the library. She's pretty, blonde, and smart, and at some point I even wanted Ethan to dump Lena to be with Liv because Liv is nice and normal and won't mess up his life. Details about John were kept a secret but came out one by one every hundred pages or so. For most of the book all the reader knows is that he's into Lena, but if Lena is willing to actually betray Ethan for John is unknown. (Anyone with half a brain knows that the answer is no because the series is based on Lena and Ethan's relationship.) It's interesting to compare the two characters though-Liv, full of life and personality, and John, depressing and dangerous.

The best character by far is Ridley. She is funny, smart, dangerous, and what's best, slightly evil. I usually don't like anti-heroes like Ridley, but she's the only interesting person in the whole book. Ethan is acting all hero-ey; Lena gets increasingly more messed up by the page; Liv is too new to know; Link is boringly normal.

4.1 stars. Mediocre, but not a complete waste of time.