Beautiful Darkness
Authors: Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Publication Date: Oct. 12, 2012
Pages: 503
Series: Caster Chronicles, two
Source: purchased hardcover and audiobook
Read by: Kevin T. Collins
Audiobook Publisher: Hachette Audio
Length: 15 hours, 56 min
About the Book: 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. (goodreads)
My Thoughts: I read Beautiful Creatures back in 2009 and immediately fell in love. I adored the atmospheric feel of the story. I felt like I was there. I have no idea what took me so long to read book two. I think it’s because it came out about the time I first got in to blogging and I went a little crazy thinking I needed to read all the new books that everyone else was blogging about. Anyway, thank goodness for students who fall in love with series and make me read them so we can discuss! Seriously. They’ve got me caught up on so many series!
Random digression over. On to Beautiful Darkness. I feel like this is a review where I have to talk about the audio aspect in with my thoughts because I can’t really separate them. I think I’m in the minority when I say I didn’t really care for the audio. It wasn’t terrible. I really liked that the “Seventeen Moons” song was sung. Actually, it’s still stuck in my head! The pacing was pretty great too. There were two main things that kept pulling me out of the story.
1. The background noises. It turns out I really don’t like sound effects in an audiobook. Rain falling, doors creaking, etc… really jars me out of my listening groove. The sound effects used in this audiobook were appropriate to the mood and time used but I just wasn’t feeling it.
2. Ethan’s dialog voice. This one is kind of confusing. When Ethan is thinking or telling the story to us I have no problem with his voice. I actually like it. However, when he is speaking to another character in the book he has a very distinct southern drawl. Now, I have nothing against a southern drawl. Heck, I even like them. I just could not get past Ethan actually having two separate voices. Again, it pulled me from the story.
Overall I liked the book. It didn’t quite have the same Southern gothic feel that I adored about the first one but that is understandable. The setting was set in the first book. Perhaps I would have felt it more had I read it closer to Beautiful Creatures. I did enjoy the twists and surprises in the plot and will certainly continue with the series. Because, I mean, ETHAN! I love him. I just don’t think I’ll be listening to the others on audio.
Here’s a different opinion on the audiobook style from Andye at Reading Teen (It’s for the audio of Beautiful Creatures but it’s the same idea! She loved it!)
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