Book #121: Beautiful Darkness

Title: Beautiful Darkness
Author: Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl

You may remember that I loved Beautiful Creatures, which I read back in May. In fact, I liked it so much that I preordered Beautiful Darkness. I started it as soon as I received it, but I soon put it down, and every time I picked it up after that, I put it down after a few pages. I was reading other things for school, but even taking that into consideration it took me a LONG time to read Beautiful Darkness, and eventually I sat in bed one Sunday morning and forced myself to finish it. I fell asleep about ten times while trying to finish it. So either there's something seriously wrong with me, or else the book has some flaws. I think I'll go with the book having flaws.

Once again, we have the story of Ethan, a mortal boy, who is in love with Lena, a Caster girl (Casters are kind of like witches) who isn't sure if she's good or evil, and who is now mourning the death of the uncle who raised her. In the first several hundred pages of Beautiful Darkness, Lena's in mourning. Remember the first several hundred pages of Harry Potter, where Harry is all hormonal and mopey and everyone wants to sock him? That's how I felt reading Beautiful Darkness. Lena's hanging around with a bad crowd, making stupid decisions, and Ethan doesn't understand why he's losing her. Rather than turn to the next available female (namely Olivia, a college student working with him in his summer job at the town library) Ethan enlists Olivia and his best friend Link to travel the tunnels underneath the DAR building (remember, nothing in Gatlin is really as it appears-- nearly everyone, even the mailman, has some contact with the supernatural world) to hunt for Lena and bring her back to him.

The book eventually picks up. The three leave Gatlin and search for Lena throughout the coastal South, and they discover that she's not really being a jerk. Beautiful Darkness has a satisfying ending, and I still appreciate that Garcia and Stohl are as concerned with good writing as with telling a good story, but I wish that the first 300 pages had a little more action. I'm not sure that I'll read the next book in the series.