Beautiful Darkness by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl

I've been eagerly awaiting this book--the second in a projected quartet called The Caster Chronicles--since I read the first volume, Beautiful Creatures, back over the summer. I was so eager, in fact, that when I arrived at the Union Station Barnes & Noble, the booksellers had yet to put the books out on the shelves. It was, after all, the first day the book was available for purchase.

The books are set in a sleep Southern town in South Carolina, where the grits are cheesy and the people wave Confederate flags, and everything is always the same. Ethan Wate, the youngest scion of a family that's been holed up in the same town for generations, dreams of getting away until he meets Lena Duchannes, a mysterious girl who's come to live with her creepy uncle, the town's resident social pariah and enigma. As Ethan and Lena begin a relationship, Ethan learns more and more about Lena and her uncle's secrets, the town's shady history, and his own family's closeted skeletons. With endearing characters, vivid settings, and an original "universe" (for the fantasy/sci-fi novice, that refers to the rules and conventions of a fictional world), readers get sucked into Ethan and Lena's lives and find themselves thinking about this unlikely couple even when the book is finished.

Like I said, I was super excited for Beautiful Darkness to come out. So, did it live up to my expectations? Definitely. Plenty of surprises, twists, and unexpected appearances made this next book a thrilling and exceptional read. For those who have read Beautiful Creatures, some people we thought were dead aren't--or aren't exactly. Other characters who we thought we understood aren't quite all they previously appeared. And the secrets of Gatlin have only gotten deeper and more impenetrable. No more spoilers!

A Must Read for everyone, particularly if you haven't gotten into this series yet. Pick up Beautiful Creatures and get your rear in gear!

The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton

It's not every day that I come across a book I love so much that I recommend it to everyone I have the chance to. This novel is one of those rare volumes that I think everybody ought to read.

The Forgotten Garden tells the story of Nell Andrews, an Australian woman living a happy life, young and engaged and carefree, until her father tells her on her twenty-first birthday that he isn't her father: he found her on the docks in Maryborough, Australia, when she was four years old with no memories and knowing only that she had crossed the ocean on a liner from another country. The harbormaster (her father) and his wife adopt the girl, naming her after their aunt Eleanor and keeping her origins a secret. Nell is understandably devastated, and feeling a stranger in her adoptive family, she withdraws further and further away from them. The narrative weaves back and forth between her traumatic sea voyage, her married life, and her golden years, detailing her quest to discover who she is and where she came from, and her only clues lie in a suitcase that her father found with her, containing a book of fairy tales written by a little-known English author. The novel goes even further, narrating Nell's granddaughter Cassandra's efforts to follow in her grandmother's footsteps after Nell dies with the mystery still elusive. Cassandra ends up learning more than she bargained for about her grandmother, about herself, and about life.

Kate Morton has a true talent for making characters come to life on the page. I cared more about and felt closer to these characters, despite the distance of third-person narrative, than I did to some first-person narrators in books I've read recently, including Andrew Marlow of Kostova's The Swan Thieves. The interweaving of past, present, and future narratives may leave some readers wrong-footed, but the story flows as if the narrative were perfectly linear and even feels logical. But the thing I loved most about this book is the gripping depiction of relationships. After all, the book's central thrust is the concept of identity, of coming to terms with one's origins and family, and nothing illustrates our identity better than our interactions with others.

Truly, this book is one for the ages. I highly recommend it to everyone. The Forgotten Garden is my first Must Read Title of this blog--and I eagerly await Kate Morton's next novel, due out in November!