Chapter by Chapter

Considering the high note that Beautiful Darkness left me on, I have been dying for the past couple of years to begin reading the sequel Beautiful Chaos. I knew that Ethan and Lena’s journey would only lead to something far more exciting and something that would (of course) leave my breath taken away just like in the past two novels. If you’ve read the last two Caster Chronicles novels (and if you haven’t then what are you doing here? Go read the last two novels, this will be filled with spoilers) then you know that Lena (last chance) and Ethan Wate have been through just about everything together and after her going on a slightly emo rage in the last novel, the young couple now prepares to face the aftermath of Abraham Ravenwood’s return and the cataclysmic events that he threatens to bring.Beautiful Chaos starts after the events that took place in Beautiful Darkness, where Ethan and Lena are finally back together and things seem to be going back to normal… except for the part where everything in the small town of Gatlin seems to be going straight to hell. The weather has been reaching an all-time high, locusts are filling the sky and a “tornado” almost destroys all of Gatlin; It’s all because of Lena’s strange claiming that has left her as both a Light and Dark Caster. When the antagonist Abraham Ravenwood comes visiting Ethan in hopes of finding out the location of John Breed, it becomes clear that Abraham will go to extreme lengths to get what he wants. Upon discovering that there is something called the Wheel of Fate and that it plans to sacrifice somebody, Ethan fights to find out just who it is that has been prophesized to be killed and why it is that he keeps hearing a sullen song about eighteen moons that seems to always be one step ahead of him.The first thing that I noticed about Beautiful Chaos was that it started at a bit of a slow pace, but it also helped in reminding readers of all the things that happened in the last novel. That was helpful for me, considering that I read the last novel a couple of years ago and was drawing a blank when it came to what happened in the past novel. The one thing that I liked about the beginning of Beautiful Chaos was that it gave off a dark feel that made the tone of the novel shift with the locusts filling the sky, Ethan seeming to have some major sensory issues and characters finally expressing their real emotions (I saw this mostly in Ridley).One thing that fans of the series will love so far is that Ethan gets these flashbacks of Sarafine back when she was claimed as a Dark Caster in her teenage years and shows how she evolved from a girl named Izabel to how she tried fighting the Darkness within her only to give up when Abraham Ravenwood appeared and began teaching her how to use her powers. We get to see her thoughts of Lena before she went totally insane and we see her right before she killed Lena’s father John Eades. I don’t want to give too much away, but Lena does indeed see her mother in this novel again and the two face off in a scene that (I think) is one of the most memorable in the series.The novel managed to keep up a pretty good pacing, it reached its high points when it absolutely needed to and when things did get a bit slow, it was still exciting. I know that fans of the series will die when they read the end of the novel, not only because of the memorable scene mentioned above but because it ends on an absolute cliff-hanger that had me staring wide eyed. I’m so excited to read the next novel (especially so I can find out if what I think happened at the end of the novel didn’t actually happen).I would recommend the Caster Chronicles to fans of fantasy, those of us who want a story that you will not want to put down and readers who love epic YA romances.