Beautiful Darkness

I picked this one up because the first book left me with Gatlin in my head and I wanted to know what happened after Lena refused to be Claimed. Beautiful Creatures had ended with a rescue that cost a life, and I remember closing it and thinking that the price would hang over everything next. Beautiful Darkness came out October 12, 2010 from Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 512 pages in hardcover, ISBN 9780316077057, second in the Caster Chronicles series. I read it slower than the first, in pieces over a week, with a pencil stuck in the back for marking pages where I got confused about who was related to whom.

Ethan Wate is still our narrator, still sixteen and still stuck in Gatlin, South Carolina, and he opens at a funeral. Macon Ravenwood is dead, or everyone believes he is dead, and the whole town turns out to bury a man most of them avoided when he was alive. Incubuses stand at the edge of the graveyard and have to leave before sunup. Lena holds a small silver sparrow some boy gave her and will not let go of it. Ethan tries to reach her through the Kelting, the silent thinking together they can do, and she barely answers. That quiet between them is the whole start of the book.

For weeks after, Lena hides in Ravenwood Manor. She will not leave the house except when her grandmother makes her. She will not talk about the night of her birthday, when she held off the Claiming and pulled Ethan back from death. Ethan hears a song that will not leave him alone, something about seventeen moons, and when he tries to ask Lena about it she shuts him down. I found these early chapters sad in a way that felt true to being seventeen. Ethan keeps bringing food and jokes and patience, and none of it lands, because Lena is convinced she broke the order of things and that loving Ethan is what will get him killed next. She tells herself she is protecting him by going cold. He hears it as rejection. Both of them are partly right, which makes it worse.

Macon's empty chair

Macon's absence changes every room. In the first book he was the man behind the curtain, paying bills, making deals, keeping Lena guarded while pretending not to care what Gatlin thought. Now Ravenwood feels too big and too quiet. Ethan misses Macon too, though he never fully trusted him. I missed him as a reader because he was one of the few adults who acted like an adult.

Ethan's own house is not steady either. His father is still half gone with grief over his mother, Lila, who died when Ethan was small. Amma, who raised Ethan and who knows more about Casters than she ever says straight, starts acting strange. She burns things in bowls. She tells him to stay out of places she will not name. In book one she was warm and sharp. Here she is afraid, and a frightened Amma is a sign the trouble is bigger than school gossip.

School restarts and Lena goes back because she has to. For a day or two it almost looks normal. Then on the last day of school they go to the lake together, and for an hour Lena laughs like herself. Then they kiss and her power flares and the grass around them catches fire and Ethan gets hurt. It is not bad, a burn he can hide, but Lena sees it as proof. She runs. A boy on a motorcycle is there at the wrong moment, and she climbs on behind him and is gone while Ethan stands in the water with his shirt half burned.

Liv and John Breed and the county fair

Two new young people come into Gatlin that summer, and both matter. Olivia Durand, called Liv, shows up to work in the library with Marian Ashcroft. Marian is the town librarian and a Keeper, one of the people who guard Caster knowledge, and she was a close friend of Ethan's mother. Liv is about their age, quick and used to books. Ethan is asked to show her around town. They eat at the Dar-ee Keen, and Lena sees them laughing together and drives past fast. It is jealousy, plain and simple, and the book lets it sit there without making Liv a villain. A lot of second books bring in a new girl just to make the old girl jealous. Liv has her own job to do.

The boy on the motorcycle is John Breed. He says little. He gave Lena the sparrow at the funeral. He starts spending time with Lena and with Ridley, Lena's cousin, who is Dark and fond of talking people into things they later regret. Ethan decides Ridley must be pushing Lena with her persuasion gift. He gets Link to help him trail them to a Caster bar called Exile, expecting proof Lena is being controlled. What he finds is harder. Lena is dancing with John, laughing, choosing it. She tells Ethan to leave. Ethan comes home furious and ashamed of being furious, and he almost does something stupid with Liv later and Lena hears it through the Kelt.

The county fair scene is where Gatlin and magic crash together. There is a pie contest. Ridley and John and Lena spoil every pie except Amma's with beetles crawling out of the crusts, and Ethan's great aunt faints, and the whole tent screams. Then the three of them slip into the Tunnel of Love ride and vanish into the actual Tunnels, the passages under the South that connect Caster places. Ethan and Link go after them through the Lunae Libri, the hidden Caster library under the Gatlin library, and find Liv already there with Marian. That reveal, that Liv is training to be a Keeper, lands well because the clues were there in how she handles books.

Into the Tunnels

The Tunnels are my favorite idea in this book, even when they confused me. Think of them as halls under the everyday world, with doors that open onto different times and places if you know how to ask. Some doors show Gatlin during the burning long ago, when soldiers came and Ravenwood almost fell. You can get lost fast if you do not have a guide or a map. Marian warns them. She tells Ethan he may be a Wayward, a Mortal who can find people who are lost down there. Ethan decides that means Lena. I am still not sure the book fully explains Waywards, but I liked that Ethan finally has a part beyond waiting on the porch.

Ethan, Link, and Liv set out with packs and jokes that fade fast. Link complains about the dark and then goes quiet, which tells you how scared he is. Liv reads marks on walls. Ethan follows pulls in his chest and sounds that remind him of his mother. They get turned around. Then they run into Ethan's Aunt Prue, who should not be down there and is, with maps of the passages drawn in a shaky hand. It is a strange, sweet stop in the middle of fear.

Ridley finds them down there too, and this surprised me. She says Lena is in real danger and that she broke with Sarafine, Lena's Dark mother, to warn Ethan. Sarafine punished her by taking her powers. So the girl who could talk anyone into anything is suddenly ordinary and asking for help. I did not fully buy her turn at first. It felt fast. But the book earns it in small bits. Ridley is tired of being used. She loves Lena in her crooked way. Link, of all people, is gentle with her, which I did not expect and liked a lot.

The Arclight and Ethan's mother

The object that ties the middle together is the Arclight, a small round thing that can hold an Incubus or a Succubus inside it. Ethan keeps seeing it in visions. He sees Abraham Ravenwood, Macon's grandfather and a source of old Dark power, carry the Book of Moons into Ravenwood and try a trade with blood to save the house from burning, while his brother Jonah begs him to stop. Abraham drinks and changes that night. Ethan wakes from it calling out. Marian gives Ethan the Arclight when he visits his mother's grave, and Ethan starts to understand that his mother left him tools on purpose because she knew he would need them.

I should say I got lost in the history here more than once. There are many names and many dates, and Ethan learns things in visions that come without much warning. I had to flip back to remember who Jonah was and why the Book of Moons mattered. The book tries to help through Marian's explanations in the archive, and through Macon's journal, which Ethan reads in pieces, and through Lena's own journal, which Ethan finds in her room and reads with guilt. Those journals helped me. Macon writes like a tired man trying to fix old mistakes. Lena writes like a girl trying to remember a night she wants to forget.

The reveal about Macon hit me hardest. Ethan works out that Macon did not die the way everyone thinks. When Lena called on the Book to save Ethan, the price taken was Macon, and Lila, Ethan's mother, caught Macon in the Arclight to keep him from true death. So the man they buried is not in the grave. Ethan and Liv free him with a Cast that leaves them shaking. Macon comes out thin and weak. He can barely stand in sun. But he is alive in some form, and Lena does not know yet. I thought this was well done, even if the mechanics are soft. Grief makes you want a trick like this to be real.

The Great Barrier

Everything points to a place most Casters say is a story, the Great Barrier, far in the Tunnels where Lena is heading with John. Ethan believes she is walking into a trap. Lena is not stupid, though. She made a bargain and she thinks she can end the pull between Light and Dark by reaching the Barrier first. John knows the way. Sarafine wants Lena there too, because Lena never took the Claiming and her unclaimed state under a Claiming Moon gives off power others can draw on. The Dark Casters in her family want her to pick Dark, because the old rule says if she picks Light, the Dark ones tied to her blood will die.

The last stretch is a race and then a standoff. They find Lena unconscious among Dark Casters with Sarafine speaking soft over her. Macon spends what little strength he has to shield them. Ethan pushes through to Lena by talking, not by blasting. He tells her to claim herself, not Light, not Dark, herself. Ridley, powerless Ridley, tells Lena to pick Light even though it could kill her too. John is shown as what he is, a mix of Caster and Incubus, part of the plan to turn Lena, and then he is gone. Abraham arrives, says Lena has broken the natural way and there will be a cost, and leaves with Sarafine and the others like a door shutting.

Ethan and Lena find each other in the quiet after, and it is tender without fixing much. She is still unclaimed. Link admits John bit him in the fight and that he can feel himself changing toward Incubus, hungry in a new way. Macon has to stay hidden because Gatlin buried him. They put the Arclight in his empty grave to hide it, and after they walk away a man in a white suit picks it up and carries it off. So nothing is settled. The danger stepped back one room, not out of the house.

What kept me reading and what wore me down

I stayed for Ethan's voice. He is still funny about small things, Link's band, Amma's cooking, the library's dust. He tries to do right and often picks the wrong way to do it. He is jealous of John and admits it. He keeps showing up. As a narrator he is easy to spend time with, even when he misunderstands Lena for chapters. I also stayed for Link, who grows here from comic relief to someone with a real cost ahead, and for Liv, who reads as smart without reading as perfect. She gets tired. She keeps walking anyway.

Lena is harder in this book, on purpose, and I wrestled with that. Here she broods, hides things, runs with people who hurt Ethan, and shuts him out of plans that involve him. I understood why. She blames herself for Macon. She is terrified her love is poison. Still, there were long stretches where I wanted one plain talk between them instead of another chase. The book gives them a late night scene, Lena in Ethan's room asking forgiveness, both of them crying and then sleeping side by side without fixing the world. It helped. One more talk like that in the middle would have helped more.

The length and the middle sagged for me. At 512 pages there is a lot of walking, a lot of doors that open onto almost something, a lot of dreams that fade on waking. I liked the Tunnels as an idea, but as a road they blur. I started skimming descriptions of dark and damp around the fourth day underground. The history visions come so fast that Abraham and Jonah and the Book and the song tangled in my head. I think a reader who loves archive puzzles will forgive this. I mostly did, because Macon in the Arclight paid off, but I will not pretend the path there is tight.

The magic rules stay loose. What a Caster can do seems tied to feeling and blood and Moon timing, and the book explains it in talk rather than showing consistent costs. Why Sarafine can do one thing in one scene and not in the next is not always clear. I accepted most of it because the story is about grief and choice more than about a system, but if you want firm limits, this book will test your patience. Ethan being a Wayward is a good example. It gives him a role and explains how he finds doors, yet it arrives as a label from Marian more than as a skill we watch him learn.

I also want to note the writing credit question people raise. The cover for this series names two writers, and the first book on this site lists both names. This post follows the list line that names Kami Garcia, so the byline here reads Kami Garcia. The voice did not shift for me from book one. Ethan sounds like Ethan. Gatlin sounds like Gatlin.

If you liked the first book for the town and the girl holding the power, read this. If you need the couple together on every page, know they spend much of this apart. If you are here for Ridley and Link, you get more of them than before. If you are tired of middle books that travel far to set up the next Moon, this will feel like that at times, even as it gives Ethan and Lena a reunion that feels earned.

For facts kept straight here: first published October 12, 2010 by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers in the United States, 512 pages in hardcover, ISBN 9780316077057, authorship listed here as Kami Garcia per the source list line, series Caster Chronicles book two, following Beautiful Creatures. Those details match the edition cited and the summary above follows that text.