Ethan Wate used to think of Gatlin, the small Southern town he had always called home, as a place where nothing ever changed. Then he met mysterious newcomer Lena Duchannes, who revealed a secret world that had been hidden in plain sight all along. A Gatlin that harbored ancient secrets beneath its moss-covered oaks and cracked sidewalks. A Gatlin where a curse has marked Lena’s family of powerful Supernaturals for generations. A Gatlin where impossible, magical, life-altering events happen.

Sometimes life-ending.

Together they can face anything Gatlin throws at them, but after suffering a tragic loss, Lena starts to pull away, keeping secrets that test their relationship. And now that Ethan’s eyes have been opened to the darker side of Gatlin, there’s no going back. Haunted by strange visions only he can see, Ethan is pulled deeper into his town’s tangled history and finds himself caught up in the dangerous network of underground passageways endlessly crisscrossing the South, where nothing is as it seems.

After the events that took place on her sixteenth birthday, Lena is now stuck between being a good and a bad Caster. She is also heartbroken, and everything she is going through seems to be affecting her relationship with Ethan, who sees the girl he likes losing herself to the magic and escaping between his fingers. Decided to do something to help her and bring the Lena he knows back, he puts himself into researching in the library, while Lena seems to fall into the trap of the Dark Casters of her family.

There. That’s it. We have more than 500 pages about it, and the story, as with the first book, seems to drag in the middle, not going forward neither backwards. Lena and Ethan grow up, and learn to be apart, not the same person, and this was the main point of this story. The first book irritated us a little because it seemed too centered in Lena, and even if Ethan was telling us the story, we didn’t get the character.

In this one, both of them are at different spheres on some parts, and they need to grow and find a way to be together, but while they to it, they don’t depend on each other as much. We still loved the mythology and the Caster’s dramas, but the second book in the series had the same problem the first one had: it was way too long. Maeva ended up skipping some parts that felt unecessary—yeah, she was that bored!

Sometimes we think that if we continue reading this series, we will conclude that everything could be done in a stand-alone novel, and that’s why now we’re the ones dragging: waiting lots of time to get the courage to read the next one.

Author: Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl
Country: United States
Language: English
Genre(s): Young Adult, Fantasy
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Publication date: October 12, 2010
Pages: 503
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