Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Dead Beautiful by Yvonne Woon (Book Review)

*Disclosure- I received a copy of the book from Disney Book Group via NetGalley. I was not required to write a positive review and all opinions stated are 100% my own.

About the book:



On the morning of her sixteenth birthday, Renee Winters was still an ordinary girl. She spent her summers at the beach, had the perfect best friend, and had just started dating the cutest guy at school. No one she'd ever known had died. But all that changes when she finds her parents dead in the Redwood Forest, in what appears to be a strange double murder.

After the funeral Renee's wealthy grandfather sends her to Gottfried Academy, a remote and mysterious boarding school in Maine, where she finds herself studying subjects like Philosophy, Latin, and the "Crude Sciences."

It's there that she meets Dante Berlin, a handsome and elusive boy to whom she feels inexplicably drawn. As they grow closer, unexplainable things begin to happen, but Renee can't stop herself from falling in love. It's only when she discovers a dark tragedy in Gottfried's past that she begins to wonder if the Academy is everything it seems. Little does she know, Dante is the one hiding a dangerous secret, one that has him fearing for her life.

My thoughts on the book:

I am almost always up for a YA Paranormal story. When I read the above description of Dead Beautiful I knew it would be something that I would absolutely enjoy reading. What I didn't know was that it is over 400 pages long and the funny thing is, I didn't realize that while reading it either. The story flowed so well and was so interesting, it did not at all seem like a long book. Dead Beautiful is mostly about Renee and her transition from her normal life to her new life at Gottfried Academy. She found that her parents death was odd and didn't believe the cause the medical examiner gave and once she uproots her life to Gottfried, the more she believes that something was amiss. One of the things I really liked about this book was the interesting storyline between Renee and Dante. Yes, it is the same old girl sees brooding teenage boy and there is a magnetic attraction that we have heard time and time again, but an interesting twist about the two of them at the end of the novel definitely has me ready to read the next book in this series to see what happens and to learn more about their story. I also really enjoyed the interesting and thoroughly detailed history of the Gottfried school. I can tell that author put a great deal of  effort into making sure this story  was packed with detail and that many of the questions the reader might have were answered by the end of the book. The ending was phenomenal and a great segue into the second book Love Eternal, which is without a doubt high on my to-read priority list. One of the things I was excited about hearing when I decided to read Dead Beautiful was that the 3rd book Love Reborn will be coming out in the coming year on January  7th, so I won't have to wait in between novels coming out to read the whole story. I am terrible at waiting when it comes to book series! I would recommend Dead Beautiful to anyone who enjoys YA or Paranormal stories or just has a hankering to read something a little different.

Dead Beautiful and Love Eternal are available now on and Love Reborn is available for pre-order on Amazon.com.

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