Don's Reviews > Beautiful Chaos

I've long felt (particularly with the previous book Beautiful Darkness) that the Caster Chronicles (1) don't need to each be 500 pages long and (2) don't even need to be a series. A book or two could have probably done the job.

But here we are at massive book #3. I do still very much like the series and considering the cliffhanger, am patiently waiting for book #4. Beautiful Chaos has many of the strengths of its predecessors: the rich Southern atmosphere (I practically read this series just for that), the poetic writing and a cast of characters I care about who are both quirky and human. That probably goes a long way to explaining the book's length: the authors just want to watch these characters go about their not-so-normal everyday lives. I really like those segments. If only they weren't mixed in with the "something terrible is going to happen" trick the authors have pulled on their readers twice already.

The "plot" sits in "something terrible is going to happen" mode for about 400 hundred pages. Call it 'the question stage.' Then the reader gets about 100 pages to actually clear up the mysteries ('the answer stage') and then the last 30 or so for the thing you were waiting for to really start ('the consequence stage'). And then the authors cut it short: they end on a cliffhanger. So I can only imagine that book #3 has really just been prologue to book #4.

I spent too much time yelling at the characters, "It's ----!" but didn't get sated until it was too late and the authors wouldn't even let me enjoy the payoff. I was practically cheering the character to his/her death just for the pure pleasure of "something is actually happening!" The main push, of course, is for me to buy book #4 and I suppose it has worked in so far as I might be annoyed but invested enough in these characters to see them through.

I don't know how to solve this "imbalance": between the slice-of-life stuff and the high stakes "our love is destroying the world" stuff. At least, Beautiful Chaos handled it better than Beautiful Darkness.