Beautiful Darkness (Caster Chronicles #2) by Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl: Book Review

Boy did this book take a long time to get going. I honestly had a difficult time reading it (and caring about reading it) until exactly the half-way point. In a book that's 500 pages long, reading 250 pages before anything good happens is just too long in my opinion. Close to nothing happens in the first half, and then almost too much happens too fast in the last 250 pages. The end climax was especially frenetic and confusing. I'm not 100% sure I understand what exactly happened. People kept popping up where they shouldn't have been and everything was twisted and turned upside down. People who were dead really aren't dead, people who were dark really aren't dark, and no one is sure of anything. Least of all me.

Book #2 really suffered from lack of the Lena-Ethan story. In fact, I didn't like Lena at all in this book. She was whiny and mopey and boring, and I couldn't find it in me to care what happened to her. Thankfully the characters of Ethan and Link are more interesting; this book was more about Ethan's journey than Lena anyway. I really like Link, and I'm looking forward to reading the short story Dream Dark, which takes place between this book and book #3.

I think this book also suffers from the difficulty of having two authors. It's just hard for two people to write one story, and it showed in this one. I felt there were continuity issues throughout, little things that weren't consistent and that jarred me from the story.

I thought the characters of John Breed and Olivia (Liv) were kind of pointless distractions. What is their purpose? If Lena and Ethan's love is so strong and so real, why was there a distraction in Liv and John? The fact that both Lena and Ethan were so easily drawn away from each other and to the characters of John and Liv made it seem that their love really wasn't all that strong to begin with. So why have a story? And what happened to Liv in the end? Both characters just seemed unnecessary to me. The same action could have happened completely without them.

I loved Link, Ethan, Lucille Ball the cat, Macon, Marian, Lila, Ridley, and the sisters. They were the only things that saved this book from two stars for me. I will read Link's short story, but beyond that, I'm not sure I care to read on.