Beautiful Darkness by Kami Garcia, Margaret Stohl

Beautiful Darkness (Beautiful Creatures, #2)

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.

Reviewed by tellemonstar on

4 of 5 stars

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Full review here.

Thankfully, this book didn't suffer from second-novel syndrome. It answered questions that were raised in Beautiful Creatures, and raised some more to be answered in the next one. Ethan and the gang had themselves some adventures in Beautiful Darkness.

I appreciated the fact that the authors didn't just make Lena stay the same as she had been before after the events in the previous novel. Beautiful Darkness gave us a deeper look in to the pull of Light and Dark on Lena, and how she felt about having to choose to declare herself one of the other, particularly at the expense of half her family. It obviously affected her quite a lot, and the fact that she felt quite guilty about Macon, and what happened to Ethan as well, was very apparent.

There was a few things revealed about Ethan's mum, and about Macon that sort of come out of the blue for me, and I felt as confused as Ethan when we found out these things.

One of my favourite things about this was the Tunnels. They are like a characters within themselves really, and gave a 'Alice in Wonderland' feel to parts of the second half of Beautiful Darkness.

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Reading updates

  • Started reading
  • 9 May, 2013: Finished reading
  • 9 May, 2013: Reviewed