ARC Review: Beautiful Darkness

Book two in the Caster Chronicles by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl is BEAUTIFUL DARKNESS. It is available from Little, Brown on October 12, 2010. I was able to score a copy at ALA.

I really enjoyed this one. As usual, I'm not sure which book in the series I like better. The writing was fantastic. The story was interesting. I love when you can read a book and have no idea what's going to happen next. There's a lot of mystery in this gothic romance, and it keeps the reader guessing. Predictability is not something I enjoy in a book. It's a really long book for a YA. And I think because of that it takes a while for things to really get going. The second half of the novel moved a lot faster than the first.

I love Ethan. He is swoon-worthy. Where I can find one of him? Well, an older version of him. I love so many characters in this series... which is rare. Most of the time there are characters I don't like. In this series, it's just the baddies I don't like. The world was expanded. Characters were added. But Amma remains one of my favorites, as well as Ethan's great aunts. I didn't like Lena as much in this one, but I like that we got to know Ridley more.

I loved the Star Trek Prime Directive reference. I'm a Star Trek geek, so I loved this. There was one line that made me laugh so hard I had to put the book down. For those who have the ARC, page 152... the line with "nekkid" in it.

I'm excited for the next installment. Curious about the Epilogue. Definitely pick this one up when it hits the shelves.

Synopsis:

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.

And below is the cover that the ARCs have. It was the original cover. It's hard to tell in the pic, and even when you have the ARC in your hand, but I saw a poster and the white spots are snowflakes. I originally thought they were stars, but they definitely look like snowflakes. Which makes no since as the book takes place during the summer.