Epic sequel--Ethan's sweet as ever, but it's a down book for Lena
In this sequel to Beautiful Creatures, Lena the Caster girl wasn't claimed by Darkness on her 16th birthday, like everybody expected, so she and her mortal boyfriend Ethan Wate should have a normal, happy life. But Lena feels guilty over the death of her uncle/surrogate father Macon Ravenwood, and while she hasn't been claimed by the Dark, she doesn't fully belong to the Light, either, which could spell trouble for everybody around her, especially vulnerable non-magical Ethan.
As a second installment, Beautiful Darkness is a tour de force--it takes all the same elements as the first novel, turns a few on their heads, and ratchets everything else up a notch or two on the dramatic scale. You still get that lush Southern Gothic feel from BC, but now there's a whole lot more Caster magic and mystery swirling around. The plot twists proceed naturally from the setup of the previous story, but every new discovery manages to feel surprising.
Yet for all that, I didn't really enjoy reading it. I like Ethan, the POV character, and wholeheartedly sympathize with him, but I've finally figured out why he's never seemed fully real to me: it's not that his narrative voice sounds feminine, but to me he sounds like a very young guy. Ethan's incredibly mature and loyal and brave, etc, but even with his ever-growing love for Lena, I almost feel like I'm reading about Percy Jackson, age twelve. There's just a general broad sweetness to him that seems to belong to a younger person.
Then there's Lena, who I liked in book one, but who has now become a complaining heroine. Lena had her fair share of troubles in BC, but now she's riding a full-time down, and Ethan's so tied to her, that means he's down and depressed, too. She has ample reasons to be sad/angry, reasons that become more evident as BD progresses, but I still wish she wouldn't wallow in her black moods. Now that her Dark side is coming out more, she'll cause a little trouble or exact just the teeniest bit of revenge, and she won't really be sorry about it (I don't necessarily think she needs to be sorry for some of the stuff), but she'll cry anyway. Then Ethan tries to comfort or encourage her, and she tells him that he doesn't understand and he'll never understand, because he's mortal.
This was a case of the heroine turning me off of the story, because by the time the truly tremendous Big Reveals are happening in the last fifth of the book, I was already emotionally uninvested: I figured, Ethan's wonderful and he'll be okay no matter what, and Lena will be sad no matter what, so I didn't feel the impact of the game-changing scenes like I wanted to.
Poetry Bonus: I absolutely love the eerie simplicity of the Seventeen Moons song. Love it. And Lena writes poetry, and greats like T.S. Eliot, Walt Whitman, and Robert Frost are mentioned.
Though this sequel gets exciting and epic, it still maintains the basic feeling established in Beautiful Creatures--if you enjoyed that, you'll enjoy this. Fans of the series will want to pick it up as soon as they can, because it delivers everything we've hoped for and more. People who are on the fence, however, can probably wait to get it from the library.
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