Critique: Beautiful Darkness (Caster Chronicles #2) (Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl) 2/2

 

*****SPOILERS*****

 

Grammar

 

There weren’t so many glaring mistakes in this book’s punctuation.

Okay, so the first mistake made me chuckle: they wrote ‘Ya’ll’. This is to mean ‘you all’, clearly. But the abbreviation is the ‘ou’ so that’s where the apostrophe of abbreviation should be, hence ‘y’all’.

Quite often a character will say a sentence with the explicit purpose of making reference to a specific word. This word should be in quotation marks but this doesn’t happen in this book. There’s ‘an activity the Sisters referred to as exercising.’ The ‘exercising’ should be in quotation marks. ‘Thelma always called the Sisters girls.’ The ‘girls’ should be in quotation marks.

 

 

Culture Shock

 

This book didn’t have as many as the previous one. Yet somehow these are more shocking.

Ethan pronounces mayonnaise like ‘mann-aise’. Um, what?

They’re dissecting pigs in summer school. Does this really still happen?

Prue finds it weird that Liv puts milk in her tea. But why wouldn’t you?

Aunt Prue asks Ethan to reach into her handbag (it says ‘purse’ but here in England, ‘purse’ refers to a small case in which money is kept). Yet Ethan refuses because it’s not polite. But she told him to do it, so it wouldn’t be rude. In fact, isn’t refusal to help a lady rude?

 

 

Plot Weaknesses

 

These weaknesses aren’t dents: they’re more like holes with jagged edges. If events are flimsy, so is the plot; if events are impossible, so is the plot. Everything from that point on becomes impossible (in this book and, more worryingly, the rest of the series). Of all the problems a plot could have, this is by far the worst.

            Ethan and company bump into a group of incubuses. Ridley uses her siren powers to make them leave. Earlier the readers were told sirens couldn’t control an incubus. How then can Ridley control a whole pack? Yet the whole plot relies on this event (otherwise the characters would’ve died and thus the plot ends): the fact that this event is incompatible with what we already know, it’s a serious plot hole.

            Macon’s light magic drives off the vexes and the incubuses. It doesn’t dive off the Dark Casters, however. They should have stopped Ethan from going up the alter but they didn’t. They let him do that, even though they knew it would stop what they wanted to happen?

 

 

Thoughts

 

These moments gave me pause for thought.

Lena feels cold. We already know that Dark Casters feel cold so this is worrying, showing which direction Lena is leaning. It’s interesting to note that Dark Casters are aligned to fire. Maybe they need the fire to warm up?

Link kicks the box in Aunt Caroline’s attic. But why would you kick someone else’s property? How could anyone be that rude and disrespectful? So much for being a southern gentleman.

Why have the authors called ghosts ‘shears’? Just changing the name for the fun of it? I know ‘caster’ is used for ‘witch’ and ‘incubus’ for ‘vampire’ but that doesn’t mean everything should be changed. It should only be changed for a genuine reason.

It says ‘Liv had been quiet until now.’ She last spoke half a page ago and they’ve all been having a general conversation since then so it’s not like Liv is acting in a noticeable way.

Ethan tells us that ‘Link had never liked the dark.’ Link just gave a speech that provided us this information so we didn’t need to be told. People don’t forget that quickly! (Also, why show and tell?)

Lena thinks she hurts all who love her. John convinces Lena to go to the Great Barrier because magic has no ‘labels or judgements’. But this just makes Light and Dark actions more acceptable, hence Lena would use Dark magic more often. So she’d hurt her loved ones more often, completely destroying the reason she went to the Great Barrier in the first place.

Ethan mentions people, incubuses clearly aren’t included within this classification. This seems rather odd. It’s a common mistake to think ‘people’ and ‘humans’ are synonyms. Even if this was a true synonym, this would mean incubuses aren’t human. But clearly they are. Not only can incubuses interbreed (and create fertile offspring) with humans but when an incubus is created with a bite, their genetic make-up doesn’t change. On both these counts, incubuses are part of the human species.

 

 

My biggest question surrounds Serafine taking Ridley’s powers away and returning them to the Dark Fire, where caster magic comes from. In essence, Ridley has to live like a mortal.

This made me think: is it possible to take powers from the Dark Fire and giving this to a mortal, hence making them a caster? Hence making it possible for mortals and casters to touch?

If this were the case, has it happened before? Considering Serafine’s a Dark caster (who despise mortals), I doubt she’d do it. Light casters, on the other hand, would be inclined to do so.

Serafine can only return Ridley’s powers because she’s super strong and a Catalyst, having an affinity for fire. Light casters don’t have an affinity for fire so they might not be able to take powers from the Dark Fire and put them inside a mortal.

 

 

Conclusion

 

Unfortunately, this isn’t a positive section.

After the slow start and middle, the latter stages of this novel had a far better pace. A lot was done but it never felt rushed. That was good writing.

The conclusion of this book was necessary for the events of the third book to make any sense. (This may seem like an obvious point but it applies especially strongly in this situation.) So most of this book felt like filler, in all honesty.

The fact that there were such massive plot holes was disappointing. Whilst these plot points don’t seem major, their consequences are problematic.

All-in-all, I don’t reread this book. Apart from Liv, it isn’t a good way to spend my time. The thing of real interest are my questions about the Dark Fire but this doesn’t really count because it’s my speculation, not world-building provided by the authors themselves.