Beautiful Darkness continues the story from Beautiful Creatures of Lena Duchannes and Ethan Wates.  Beautiful Creatures brought to us the world of Casters, set in the deep South, and the love story between Lena and Ethan.  At the end of BC Lena makes a difficult choice which has a major impact on her emotionally and which will have a major effect on her choices in BD.

I actually preferred this book to the first.  Perhaps that is because the first book was laying down a lot of the groundwork for the rest of the series and also it could be a bit repetitive in certain parts.   That aside I really enjoyed the setting – and I loved the Caster Library – which is creepy and fascinating and so I was still keen to read the second one and I’m glad I did.

This is another fairly lengthy book and does take a little while to get into although I like the style of writing which is easy to read and quite evocative.  The story this time revolves much more around Ethan but I quite enjoyed that aspect, I like Ethan’s character and I like his friends and family.  I love his 100 year old aunts, I thought (believe it or not) that the cat was great and had real attitude, Link is just funny and chilled out but a really good friend and always there for Ethan and Amma is brilliant – not to mention her cooking – which just reading about is playing havoc with my supposed diet!!  Plus, there is a couple of new additions in this book with the introduction of the dark and mysterious (not to mention bad boy) John and the good and rather lovely Liv.

I thought there was more going on in this book – a few new twists to discover and a gradual build up to the grand finale.

I also liked the ending to this book – particularly in relation to developments around Link and Ridley who I think may potentially play a bigger role in the next book (but that’s just my guess!)

In terms of criticisms – I’m not sure that the voice of Ethan always comes across as a boy of his age (or at least he is very sensitive – but that’s not unheard of I suppose).  Also, I think Lena needs more character development as she doesn’t feel, to me, to have come on very much since the first book.  Plus, in a way, there are contradictions.  First, the sixteenth birthday was a major life changing event – but then it wasn’t, then the seventeenth birthday was equally dreaded but things didn’t work out that way…

Criticisms apart – I did like this book and thought it superior to the first book.

Rating -A

Beautiful Darkness (Beautiful Creatures)