Instant New York Times bestselling sequel to The Beautiful Following the events of The Beautiful, Sébastien Saint Germain is now cursed and forever changed. The treaty between the Fallen and the Brotherhood has been broken, and war between the immortals seems imminent. The price of loving Celine was costly.But Celine has also paid a high price for loving Bastien. Still recovering from injuries … loving Bastien. Still recovering from injuries sustained during a night she can’t quite remember, her dreams are troubled. And she doesn’t know she has inadvertently set into motion a chain of events that could lead to her demise and unveil a truth about herself she’s not ready to learn.
Forces hiding in the shadows have been patiently waiting for this moment. And just as Bastien and Celine begin to uncover the danger around them, they learn their love could tear them apart.
The Damned, Renée’s latest installment in The Beautiful series is just as decadent, thrilling, and mysterious as her last, as she continues her most potent fantasy series yet.
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Our journey through New Orleans’s supernatural, hidden, society continues as Celine recovers from her ordeals at the end of last book and new secrets come to light. To make things worse, never has the Crescent City’s tenuous peace that lasted for ten years been as near of failing as the Fallen and the Brotherhood start on a collision course.
If you read my review of this series’ first book, “The Beautiful”, you know that I was really surprised, and taken, by it. And that surprise continued through “The Damned”.
What I thought it would be about was completely thrown out the window in the first couple of chapters, and continued as the book progressed. It’s not the teen or young adult story about supernatural creatures falling in love one might expect, though it exists within these pages, but a dark tale of coming of age and how to deal with the powers, dark or light, growing inside, and what road to follow.
Once again we are thrown into the past of the characters of the first book, including some of the first book’s more secondary characters like Odette, Arjun and Jae, finding out more about them and what makes them what they are, both through personal chapters’ points of view and other people’s perspectives.
We are also introduced to new worlds and their own inhabitants. Renée Ahdieh’s description of both the Sylvan Vale and the Sylvan Wyld is so vivid that you are thrown into an explosion of color and sound, or lack of either depending on which part of the Sylvan realm you are, as you turn page after page. Then you have the characters of this new realm. The ones from the Vale are bright and most welcoming and you can’t help but feel drawn to them… and also scared of them, as they are always looking and trying to trick you. The ones from the Wyld are the monsters you would expect them to be… aren’t they? The thing you get from this is to not trust anything at face value.
And then there are the revelations, which are not few in this book, but which also don’t feel like revelations just for the sake of it. These are plot-moving revelations that add to the story and that make the reader don’t want to put the book down. I found myself thinking “I wasn’t expecting that” more than once. This feeling followed me to the very last line of the book.
I won’t say this book is perfect. I was able to draw parallels to other works of fiction, be it books or TV series, but those are tropes that one can’t escape when writing some genres. Everything has been written before as someone once said. Or maybe it’s just me and maybe I’ve have read or watched too many supernatural works.
That being said, I can’t wait to go on a journey with these characters once more and see where they lead me… There has to be more right?
I binged this book immediately after reading the first, and while I was hooked on Sebastian and Celine, it started to become slightly overwhelming with the out there paranormal and I kind of wanted more of them, but got more of the overall story of all things against them. I may try the third book, but by the end of this one, I kind of lost the urge to find out what happens. The characters are amazingly developed, and once again the fire between Sebastian and Celine was palpable, but I just lost my addiction through this one. Still, a great read!
This book was nonstop magical! From page one I was hooked! I finished the first book a couple of months ago and I enjoyed it a lot, but this one was all that and more!
*Warning, Book 1 spoilers below*
Book 1 leaves off with Celine having her memories of Bastien wiped and Bastien having been turned into a vampire. Instead of starting off with Celine, whom was the main character for the first book, this story mostly takes place from Bastien’s POV and other vampires in his group. I loved this duality, so we finally see what is going one behind the series. The first book was a little slow, although there is something to be said about slow paced books to really set the mood, but this one is nonstop. We learn a lot more about the folklore behind vampires and the werewolves. I won’t spoil any more, but this a mythology that is well weaved together and left me wanting more. I really want to read book 3 right now!
If you didn’t care for book 1, I highly recommend still picking this book up to read. You will not be disappointed!