A Beautiful Dark Series Book #2: A Fractured Light by Jocelyn Davies

The one thing that you take away from this 337-paged book – even at the end of the first book – is that everything has changed. Seriously, you would have thought that would have been apparent in the last book, when Skye found out that she was the offspring of two warring faction angels, but no. This time everything has changed.

Skye has finally figured out that the Order – the supposed good guys – aren’t as good as they claim to be. Not since Devin, a member of the Order, was ordered to kill her. She somehow miraculously survived and now has to figure out how to deal with everything she knows now.

As much as I liked this book – seriously it was better than the first one – A Fractured Light still drove me crazy. It wasn’t until about halfway through the book that I started to wonder what exactly was the point? There weren’t any big plot heavy moments. No big battles between the Order and the Rebels, although the Guardians transferring into Skye’s school was sort of interesting. Asher and Skye’s relationship was cute, as was Cassie and Dan’s. I was really pissed off with Ian when he laid into Skye about liking Devin and Asher and not him. Where did he get off? She doesn’t like you like that, Ian, and that’s her decision. Yeah, she treated you like crap, but to expecting her to like you after all these years? Gah. It just wasn’t cool.

Except for finding out that Aunt Joe has known the whole time about Skye and her parents, and the last twenty pages where the finale gets set up big time, this book didn’t really advance the plot too much. I was sort of disappointed with that.

Final Rating: 4 out of 5 stars. Better than the first book, but was mostly filler.

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A Beautiful Dark by Jocelyn Davies

I’ve yet to meet an angel series that led me astray. I loved the Unearthly trilogy by Cynthia Hand and I also loved the Hush, Hush Quartet (or at least the first three books, I haven’t gotten around to reading the fourth one yet) by Becca Fitzpatrick. However, when I started reading A Beautiful Dark I thought that I finally met my match.

Skye is celebrating her seventeenth birthday when the story begins. She lives in a city outside Denver, Colorado and has three friends – Dan, Cassie and Ian. She hates celebrating her birthday because her parents died in a car crash on her sixth. But her friends never listen to her and throw her surprise parties anyway. While Skye is getting some air she meets Asher, the definition of a bad boy, and then later his cousin Devin who is everything light. Weird things start to happen after she meets these two; boilers explode, her eyes flash silver, she causes an avalanche, etc. That’s when she starts to wonder if everything is what it seems to be.

Apparently, not. It turns out her mother and father were both angels. The only difference was her mother was a Gifted angel – supposedly one of the good guys – and her father was a Rebel – supposedly one of the bad guys – they met and fell in love. Their punishment when it was found out was they were cast out from the angels and made to live with the mortals as mortals. Until Skye was born…

So about until the avalanche scene I did not like this book too much. Another book with a love triangle and a best guy friend who is crushing on the girl. Gag me. But I kept plowing through and was eventually rewarded with the major reveal that Skye was an angel, and that Devin and Asher were also angels. The downside of the big reveal was I also got this twisted back story of the Gifted versus the Rebels. I’ll be honest, I was seriously confused for the rest of the book.

This book’s only saving grace was the major cliffhanger at the end.

Final Rating: 4 out of 5 stars. Mediocre characters – seriously the narrator was a trip – and a muddled storyline. However, what an ending. Curious to see what happens next.

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