Jonas (The Beautiful Dead, #1) by Eden Maguire. © 2010 Sourcebooks Fire. ISBN 978-1-4022-3944-1. Paperback. YA/Paranormal. 272 pages. $8.99 US. [ Purchase ] Source: ARC from publisher

Synopsis: Something strange is happening in Ellerton High. Phoenix is the fourth teenager to die within a year. His street fight stabbing follows the deaths of Jonas, Summer and Arizona in equally strange and sudden circumstances.

Rumours of ghosts and strange happenings rip through the small community as it comes to terms with shock and loss. Darina,Phoenix’s grief-stricken girlfriend, is on the verge. She can’t escape her intense heartache, or the impossible apparitions of those that are meant to be dead. And all the while the sound of beating wings echo inside her head! And then one day Phoenix appears to Darina.

Ecstatic to be reunited, he tells her about the Beautiful Dead. Souls in limbo, they have been chosen to return to the world to set right a wrong linked to their deaths and bring about justice. Beautiful, superhuman and powerful, they are marked by a ‘death mark’ – a small tattoo of angel’s wings. Phoenix tells her that the sound of invisible wings beating are the millions of souls in limbo, desperate to return to earth.Darina’s mission is clear: she must help Jonas, Summer, Arizona, and impossibly, her beloved Phoenix, right the wrong linked to their deaths to set them free from limbo so that they can finally rest in peace. Will love conquer death? And if it does, can Darina set it free?

Review: It took me a while to get into this book but eventually I did, though not as much as I hoped I would. It wasn’t bad by any means, but it wasn’t insanely delicious either.

Eden’s take on the zombie legend was fantastic, however. They are not the grotesque, mindless decaying corpses you see in horror films, but the walking dead of revenant legend and sentient. I did kind of grimace when Darina was kissing aforementioned dead boyfriend—just couldn’t get past the whole zombie thing —and yet I have no qualms about vampires, weird I know.

Eden’s writing was heart-breaking and easy to relate to, though I feel the book had way too many characters for a novel this size. The author’s conveyance of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) was very well done. Jonas is also great at showing how families with teenagers deal with losing a loved one. Though, I did find the romances to be horrendously full of fluff, and these girls to be incredibly torn up over guys they had barely dated. But I guess that’s high school for you. Emotions are a gazillion times more felt in those days, whether real or not. It’s reasons like this I give it a lower rating, and also why I think this is a book teens would prefer over adults.

I am, however, looking forward to the other books.

Rating: 3 skull-heads out of 5

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