A Review By Rebecca 

Looking at the blurb of this book, I immediately assumed this was yet another Twilight clone, another book cashing in on the current teen supernatural romance craze.

I wasn’t wrong, exactly.

The basic plot is almost exactly the same as Twilight: girl who could be any female reader starts at a new school, where a group of mysterious people are estranged from the rest of the student body, and one male in particular is beautiful and quiet and speaks to no one…until she comes along.

And of course it is obvious throughout that there is something about him that is not human.

So, in short, this is Twilight, but with a few tweaks.

Dante Berlin, the Edward Cullen of Dead Beautiful, is not a vampire, though he is cold-skinned and pretty and inhumanly strong and clever. Also he speaks fluent Latin – and, in an interesting touch, Latin proves to be fairly important throughout the book. Unlike certain other male supernatural romance protagonists of recent times, Dante is not standoffish and cold, but instead rather sweet, and genuinely concerned for the girl’s safety. More importantly, he actually has a reason for falling for her immediately, though it isn’t revealed until much later on.

The female protagonist, Renee (which, I must point out, is the name of a character in Twilight, though by the end of the book the name is proven to also be vaguely plot-important) is not just an ordinary girl – she is an orphan with a talent for finding death, including her own parents’ corpses.

So there are some differences.

There is a smattering of philosophy in Dead Beautiful, but not really enough to teach the reader anything properly; although Descartes is touched upon, it is mainly a paper written by him, invented by the author, to demonstrate the lore of her paranormal creatures. However, that, and the underlying creepiness of the school Renee attends – it had been used as a children’s hospital before it was a school – are enough to give this book a bit of an edge.

Sure, the plot twists are somewhat obvious, save for the very last one, on the very last page. Sure, it’s just another Twilight, for the most part at least. But I liked it an awful lot more than I liked Twilight, and it’s certainly better than most books in the genre. Things would be a lot better, I think, if this had come out before Twilight, and this had sparked the craze.

It’s not a perfect book, and the title really ought to have been in Latin, but it was an enjoyable afternoon’s read. I’d even read the sequel.