Book #7: Beautiful Chaos

Title: Beautiful Chaos (Book #3 in the Beautiful Creatures series)

Author: Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl

Date started reading: Jan. 24, 2013
Date finished reading: Jan. 28, 2013

Publish date: October 2011
ISBN: 978-0316123525
Number of pages: 528

Official summary: "Ethan Wate thought he was getting used to the strange, impossible events happening in Gatlin, his small Southern town. But now that Ethan and Lena have returned home, strange and impossible have taken on new meanings. Swarms of locusts, record-breaking heat, and devastating storms ravage Gatlin as Ethan and Lena struggle to understand the impact of Lena's Claiming. Even Lena's family of powerful Supernaturals is affected - and their abilities begin to dangerously misfire. As time passes, one question becomes clear: What - or who - will need to be sacrificed to save Gatlin? For Ethan, the chaos is a frightening but welcome distraction. He's being haunted in his dreams again, but this time it isn't by Lena - and whatever is haunting him is following him out of his dreams and into his everyday life. Even worse, Ethan is gradually losing pieces of himself - forgetting names, phone numbers, even memories. He doesn't know why, and most days he's too afraid to ask. Sometimes there isn't just one answer or one choice. Sometimes there's no going back. And this time there won't be a happy ending." (http://www.kamigarcia.com)

How I obtained the book: Got as a Christmas present

My spoilery commentary:

• "Beautiful Chaos" was definitely the perfect title for this book. Because Lena had chosen to be neither light nor dark, the world is in utter chaos. It sort of annoyed me when the prophecy that someone who is "one but two" would have be sacrificed to put the world back in order that I knew instantly it meant Ethan. He had been having dreams/visions where he sees another version of himself. I wasn't sure why he was seeing another version of himself until it was revealed that his soul had split in two when Lena had brought him back to life in the first book, but I knew that there was "two" of him somehow. The authors tried to throw the reader off by saying that the sacrifice could be Lena or John or Liv or Link or someone else, but I always knew it was Ethan.
• It was fun to have Ridley be human again after her Caster powers were stripped in the second book, but I knew it wouldn't last. I hoped she would stay human.
• Having Macon come back to life, not as an Incubus like he was before but as a Light Caster, was also interesting. It suddenly added a whole new depth to his character. Plus, it just made him seem more human. 

Memorable quotes:

• "In Gatlin, it's funny how the good things are all tied up with the bad. Sometimes it's hard to tell which is which." ~ Ethan
• "I needed to believe that sometimes a nightmare was just a nightmare." ~ Ethan
• "Just because I'm a disgusting Mortal doesn't mean I have to dress like one." ~ Ridley
• "Your powers have never been predictable." ~ Ethan
  "Spontaneous combustion is a little more than unpredictable." ~ Lena
• "Hunger is such an incredible inconvenience." ~ Macon
• "I don't think I could ever love anything the way I love you." ~ Lena to Ethan
• "Fate is a wheel that turns without our hand." ~ Bokor
  "Don't try to sell me the silver linin' from a cloud as black as your soul." ~ Amma
• "If you tamper with the Wheel a Fate, it will continue to turn until it crushes you in its path." ~ Bokor
• "I had always hoped things would change in my town, until they started changing. Now I wanted Gatlin to go back to the boring town I'd known all my life." ~ Ethan
• "Evil doesn't always have one face, Ethan." ~ Ethan's mom
  "Yes, it does. We're talking about Light and Dark. Things don't get any more black and white than that." ~ Ethan
• "Sorry to disappoint you. He's not evil. He's just a jerk. Sometimes it's a fine line." ~ Reece about John
• "The problem with having actual evil in your life is that regular, everyday evil -- administrators giving you detention, the textbook evil that makes up most of high school existence -- starts to feel less terrifying. Unless it's your father dating your glass-eyed English teacher." ~ Ethan
• "I wanted to find a place to hide from all of it, where the nightmares and the rivers and reality couldn't find me. For me, that place was always inside a book." ~ Ethan
• "Light and Dark are two sides of the same coin." ~ Abraham
• "Getting answers out of Amma was like pulling teeth, if the teeth belonged to a gator." ~ Ethan
• "In Light there is Darkness, and in Darkness there is Light." ~ Macon
• "My life has never been about what I wanted. My choices were made for me. I tried so hard to fight the Darkness, but I wasn't strong enough." ~ Sarafine
• "Only Aunt Prue would need a bouncer for her funeral." ~ Ethan
• "No wonder Incubuses keep showing up in your room. You sleep like the dead." ~ John to Ethan
• "When I first met you, that's what I remember. I looked up at the sky and thought, 'I'm going to love this person because even the sky looks different.'" ~ Lena to Ethan
• "Life is really, really short." ~ Ethan
• "Damn, Wate. You sure have a creepy family, for a MOrtal." ~ John to Ethan
• "You Mortals are even more screwed up than Supernaturals." ~ John to Ethan

Buy on Amazon.com: Beautiful Chaos (Beautiful Creatures)