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A Beautiful Dark (A Beautiful Dark, #1)

Jocelyn Davies

Why we're reading this: It's Twilight with angels. There are two love interests, who both suck for different reasons, and there's…more
[close] It's Twilight with angels. There are two love interests, who both suck for different reasons, and there's also a third guy who's interested in the main character who exists just to be shot down

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Jun 03, 2017 Whiteraven191 rated it did not like it

Shelves: fantasy, school-setting, first-in-a-series

Cover: Looks pretty at first glance, but if you stare too long, the girl's arms start looking weirdly proportioned and it becomes clear the person who put this image together accidentally photo-shopped one of the fingers on her right hand out of existence.

Plot: Girl starts to develop strange powers and meets two hot guys who vie for her affections. This book doesn't really do anything to spice up this over-used formula. The author tries to put her own spin on angels, but it just isn't enough to Cover: Looks pretty at first glance, but if you stare too long, the girl's arms start looking weirdly proportioned and it becomes clear the person who put this image together accidentally photo-shopped one of the fingers on her right hand out of existence.

Plot: Girl starts to develop strange powers and meets two hot guys who vie for her affections. This book doesn't really do anything to spice up this over-used formula. The author tries to put her own spin on angels, but it just isn't enough to make this interesting.

Characters:

Our main character, Skye (geddit, cause she's part angel), is mostly mediocre. She has more personality than a lot of other protagonists in this genre, but everything that makes her stand out as a character goes out the window once the hot boys show up. Unfortunately, sometimes she has moments where she's just unpleasant. She gets constantly wrapped up in the drama with the two guys and her powers and ends up neglecting her friends, which is fair. But when she gets called on it, she acts like she's more upset her friend is mad at her than for being a bad friend. Like her friend is just being so inconvenient for trying to get Skye to pay attention to her. There's also this whole thing where she doesn't want people to celebrate her birthday but her friends throw a party anyway all so that Skye can whine about how unfortunate she is that most of her grade came and threw her a party. Poor, poor Skye.

Skye's friends are bland and one-note and serve little to no purpose in the story. Cassie is the cliche boy-crazy one, who's always badgering Skye about how she's totally into the hot guys even when Skye tells her to stop. She also is constantly bringing alcohol in a flask to social events and none of the other characters bat an eye. She never suffers any consequences for this, either. This is a book aimed at high school students! It should not be glamorizing underage drinking! Skye's other friend Dan has no personality and has no function in the story whatsoever. I honestly have no idea why the editor didn't cut him out of the novel.

Asher and Devin are the two obligatory hot guys for the novel. Devin is an angel belonging to the Order, a group of angels with prophetic visions who do everything in their power to make those visions happen. Asher is from the Rebellion. Devin is mostly standoffish and doesn't really do much else besides fight with Asher. Asher is supposed to be a flirtatious bad boy. I hate him so much. He does that whole flirting with other girls to make Skye jealous routine. Also, he creeps into her room and watches her sleep at night, something he's been doing since before they officially met for the first time. Why does this trope keep happening in YA books? Stalking someone is not romantic! We should not be teaching teenage girls that it is. There's also a human boy named Ian, who's sole purpose in the novel is to constantly be turned down by Skye. I guess having two hot guys competing for her affection wasn't enough for the author? Also both guys try and get Skye to abandon her home and all her friends to join one of their sides. Because that's definitely what we should encourage young girls to do: abandon everything they previously cared about just because a hot guy asked them to.

Our villain for the novel is Devin's betrothed, Raven (which is a stupid name for a blond angel with white wing-feathers). She's basically a mustache-twirling caricature.

This book was run-of-the mill terrible and I will not be finishing the rest of the series. ...more

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Jan 09, 2012 Lisi marked it as keep-in-mind

Oct 11, 2014 Lindsay rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: cover-to-cover-2014, read-in-2014, 1star, scrbd, ya

May 10, 2021 Allison marked it as to-read

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