Darkness Becomes Her

Darkness Becomes Her

by Kelly Keaton

Ari has always hated her hair.  Her hair has caused her more trouble than she can handle.  It makes her stand out.  It makes her different.  It makes her an easy target for the hunters who are after her.  And someone really wants her even though she has no idea why.

After discovering that the mother who abandoned her to foster care (and quite a few evil foster parents) killed herself while in an insane asylum because she kept thinking that snakes were crawling in her head, Ari must head back to the city of her birth to find out why her mom is dead and weird men dressed in black and speaking a foreign language are trying to kill her.

So Ari heads to New 2, which is the new New Orleans that is still recovering from the aftereffects of hurricanes that decimated it more than a decade before.  The only people who live there are the freaks, the paranormal, and the businessmen who see money in the tourist trade.

But as she starts to get her first questions answers, new ones keep coming up and Ari has no idea who she can trust.

Final thoughts:  This could have been soooo much better.  Keaton seems determined to touch on every single possible paranormal creature there is from Greek mythology to vampires, but it never fully engages.  She flits from scene to scene with no real transitions and doesn't spend enough time going into depth on anything.  She literally could have doubled the length of this book and I still think there would have been more she could have said.  I was also bothered by the somewhat sudden change of heart of Ari's romantic interest as he went from appearing to hate her one moment to being completely in love the next, with no real explanation as to why.  Finally, the tag on the book is "Beneath every beauty, evil stirs." but I can't see it.  Ari's not evil, at least not yet.  Her circumstances were not of her making and she wants a little revenge, but she's not the evil one.  Now if the author or tag writer meant the antagonist, that really should be made more clear.  Hopefully the next book will get better.

Rating: 3/5