Dead Beautiful by Yvonne Woon

Dead Beautiful by Yvonne Woon

First in the Dead Beautiful series

5 stars

On the morning of Renee Winters sixteenth birthday she skips school and goes to the beach with her best friend. While driving back from the beach she sees her parent’s car and feels compelled to go into the woods. In the woods she finds her parents dead. The police don’t think it’s murder, but to Renee it is obvious that something just isn’t right. She ends up in her grandfather’s custody and he enrolls her into Gottfried Academy. She meets Dante Berlin and feels drawn to him. When she discovers a drak tragedy in Gottfried’s past, she begins to wonder if the academy is everything it seems and if what is occurring now has something to do with what happened back then. I am glad I picked up this book at my school’s Scholastic Book Fair. This book was absolutely breathtaking. The story itself was just so cool. Dead Beautiful started out slow, but started to pick up once she started getting accustomed to Gottfried. The writing was beautiful, but sometimes the sentences got a little bit too wordy. The myth and lore in this book is something completely new to me. I thought this book was about vampires, but I was impressed by this new take on the Undead.


The main female character is Renee. Renee isn’t one of those female heroines that make salute her awesomeness. Renee was just like most YA fiction heroines, but there were times when Renee had her courageous moments. So, she wasn’t all that bad.


Kick-Butt Heroine Scale: 5

The main male character is Dante. Dante reminds of Edward in some ways and that makes me want to hate him, but at the same time Dante was completely different from Edward. Dante had his good moments and then he had his bad moments, but I think most YA males are like that.


Swoon Worthy Scale: 7

The Villain- Gideon is the villain. LOL IMO He wasn’t a very intimidating villain, but he wasn’t very nice or afraid to kill people.


Villain Scale: 6

Character Scale: 7

The ending was one of those endings that had me wanting to punch a wall or break something. I think Ms. Woon didn’t know how she wanted to end the ending so she decided to do both possible endings in this book. That was an epic fail.


But I still loved this book and I’m looking forward to reading Life Eternal.


Cover Thoughts: I think the cover is beautiful, but the gateway/passageway looks misplaced. Renee also looks like a witch with her Harry Potter cape.