A Darkness Strange and Lovely by Susan Dennard

Title: A Darkness Strange and Lovely (Something Strange and Deadly #2)
Author: Susan Dennard
Published: July 2013
Rating: 5 Stars

Darkness has come to the City of Light...

With her brother dead and her mother on the verge of insanity, Eleanor Fitt is utterly alone. Even the Spirit-Hunters—Joseph, Jie, and the handsome Daniel—have fled to Paris. So when Eleanor begins to hear the vicious barking of hounds and see images of haunting yellow eyes, she fears the worst—that the Dead, and the necromancer Marcus, are coming for her.

To escape and search out the Spirit-Hunters, Eleanor boards a steamer bound for France. There she meets Oliver, a young man who claims to have known her brother. Though friendly, Oliver entices Eleanor with necromancy and black magic, yet as long as she can resist his powerful temptation, she'll be fine. But when she arrives in Paris, she finds that the Dead have taken over the city...and there's a whole new evil lurking. With the body count rising, Eleanor is forced to make a deadly decision that will go against everything the Spirit-Hunters stand for.

In Paris, there's a price for this darkness strange and lovely...and it may have Eleanor paying with her life.

In this spellbinding sequel to Something Strange and Deadly, Susan Dennard delivers a thrilling mix of intrigue, romance, and revenge, all set against the wonderfully enchanting backdrop of nineteenth-century Paris

-Summary from Goodreads

            In this amazing sequel, Susan Dennard takes us to Paris where circumstances are darker, grittier, and more stressful for all of our characters. The dead are ravaging, something is chasing Eleanor, and the Spirit Hunters are spending more time engaging with Parisian elites than finding a solution to the ever growing number of hungry dead.

            The Something Strange and Deadly series is quickly becoming one of my favorites. Not only is it well written, but the plot interesting and engaging, and the characters are so real that you can really connect with them and their situation (I kind of find it odd when I say it all ‘feels real’ when talking about a zombie book.lol) Eleanor struggles a lot in the book because not only does she no longer have a life in Philadelphia but her necromancy powers are coming on strong and she doesn’t know how to control them. It gets her into trouble with the Spirit Hunters who believe necromancy is evil. As a reader I was struggle between shaking my head at Eleanor and telling her to “listen to Joseph” and then going “Shut up, Joseph, Eleanor has the right idea.” You could feel the confliction in Eleanor and I felt like I was struggling right alongside her, not knowing what the right answer was.

            The slow burn romance builds more in the book, but, like I said earlier, there’s a lot more frustration. Daniel is trying to transform himself into a proper gentleman and Eleanor just wants to smack him for it. All the formalities makes it harder for her to recognize the boy she had begun to fall for back in Philadelphia. Daniel doesn’t even show up on the page until almost halfway through, but it wasn’t overly noticeable as I was too engaged in the story to notice.

            We are introduced to a new character in this story named Oliver. Right at the beginning I was fearing a love triangle but, thankfully, that doesn’t seem to be the case. I’m not really sure what to think of Oliver. He’s mysterious but occasionally appears to play the honest man, and he encourages her to practice her necromancy but to what end? What’s his true motive? I guess I’ll have to find out in the last book because I have no idea, which is another thing I love about this book. So many of my reads lately have giving me no surprises or real mysteries or have left me confused (in the good way), which doesn’t really bug me but sometimes you want those things, you know. This book has given me all of the above and I love it for it!

            This book was amazing and I can’t wait to read the last one which I am impatiently waiting to come in at the library. It you haven’t picked up this series yet, now is the time. 

            -Sarah