Monday, December 19, 2011

Beautiful Chaos by Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl


Beautiful Chaos by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl is the third in the Caster Chronicles series.  I have an admission to make- I didn't actually finish this one.  Back in September, I reviewed Beautiful Darkness, the second in the series.  As you may remember, I haven't been terribly impressed with this series, but I continued because I felt like I wanted to find out what would happen.  I've said before that I have a difficult time not finishing a book or a series.  Usually this is because I am hoping the book will get better or because I suspect that my opinion of the book is somehow wrong.  With the Caster Chronicles, the online reviews have mostly been very good.  The reviews are the reason I began it in the first place.  I have now come to the conclusion that those reviews simply were not written for me.

One of the things that I have loved about Twilight is that so many people, both young and not so young, have returned to reading.  The YA genre has exploded and for the most part I would say that is a good thing.  More books available means more people are going to be able to find a book they will enjoy.  The downside is that not all of these books are good.  Or perhaps it's just that they aren't for me. 

With Beautiful Chaos, I just couldn't read it.  The plot is so busy, there are so many characters and the writing is so cryptic that the story becomes weighed down.  It isn't that I can't follow a complicated plot line and I enjoy reading well developed characters, but with these books it feels to me as if the writers just kept throwing things in to fill up the story, not to fill it out.  I was less than 100 pages in to this book when I couldn't get beyond the feeling that reading it was a chore.  There are so many good books out there that I can't waste my time on something I'm not really enjoying. 

Am I wrong about these books?  I'm happy to hear other opinions.  Perhaps I missed something. 

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