Review: Dead Beautiful

Dead  Beautiful by Yvonne Woon

Pages: 480
Publisher: Hyperion
Date Published: September 21st 2010
Copy Type: Hardcover
Copy Received by: RAK from Sara [Her Blog]

Teaser from Goodreads 

On the morning of her sixteenth birthday, Renée 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 Renée’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 Renée 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.
Dead Beautiful is both a compelling romance and thought-provoking read, bringing shocking new meaning to life, death, love, and the nature of the soul.

 

Review

This book is nice for when your looking for a not-so-simple Paranormal Romance, that takes place at a boarding school.

I when I first began this book I couldn't really tell if it was going to be Paranormal. Though there were several little hints though out the book I didn't really begin to get what was happening until the middle of the book when things were starting to heat up. 

I thought the characters, mostly the main ones, Renee and Dante seems to have very little personality to them. They never really were given any hobbies or major interests, and there didn't seem to be anything very special about the main character, Renee's love interest Dante except for how they explained that he was "Beautiful".

This book reminded me a lot of the Fallen series by Lauren Kate, which is in no way a bad thing, I thought Fallen, Torment, and Passion were great, it just seems like there wasn't anything extremely original about the story.

The ending was very incomplete. I have no idea what happened at the very end and I'm not sure what to expect if I read the next book the the series (coming out in 2012)