Beautiful Darkness Blog Tour

Some secrets are life-altering. Others are life-ending.

Page to Premiere was lucky enough to be chosen as a participant in the Beautiful Darkness Blog Tour to celebrate the release of the highly anticipated sequel to Beautiful Creatures. Our special activity for our stop was a reading with a group of students from Horseshoe Bend High School in New Site, Alabama. The six students that volunteered to participate in our reading got their own copies of Beautiful Creatures and read them on their own. Once they were finished with the book, we had a Skype conference with the authors themselves! We spent an hour asking and answering questions. The students ask Kami and Margie everything from questions about the story to questions about their writing process. Kami and Margie asked the students whether they would be light or dark, what type of Caster would they be, and even what their favorite cookie was. Sadly my recording of the call did not record the audio, so most of the specifics are now abstracts. In the end, the students were so ready to read Beautiful Darkness that they jokingly threatened to steal my ARC. At least… I think it was a joke. I learned this week that I will be going to Charleston, South Carolina to a signing that Kami and Margie are having. I will be taking the participating students copies of the books to get them signed as a thank you for their participation.

The other part of our tour stop was a five question interview with the authors, Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl. Seeing as we are a book-to-movie site, our questions revolved around the potential movie based off of Beautiful Creatures. The book was optioned by Warner Brothers and Richard Lagravanese has been named writer and director while Erwin Stoff has been named as producer. Our five questions and answers are below.

Author photo credit: Vania Stoyanova

1. What are you most excited to see on the screen?

Kami: Richard LaGravanese is such a gifted screenwriter and
director and our producer, Erwin Stoff, is equally talented. I’m
really excited to see their interpretation of the book.

Margie: The book is our vision, and the film is theirs. We tried to evoke a strong sense of place in our book, and I think a visual medium will only make that stronger. I’m very curious to see the way Beautiful Creatures translates into a film.

2. What are you most worried will be altered?

Kami: I’m not worried at all. Richard is famous for
adapting novels into films, and he does a beautiful job.

Margie: I’m not worried about the film. I’m just worried
about finishing Book 3 in the Caster Chronicles! And then Book 4! They can’t do their job until we do ours.

3. What is your biggest fear about the movie?

Kami: My biggest fear is that they will run out of popcorn.

Margie: My biggest fear is that they will ask Kami and me to play all the parts. You really don’t want to see me getting out my acting chops. I’m downright chopless.

4. Do you have any actual locations in mind that would be perfect for any scenes?

Kami: There are two towns that remind us a lot of Gatlin, Moncks Corner, South Carolina and Beaufort, North Carolina. There are so many places in both towns that remind us of Gatlin. Charleston and the plantations along the Ashley River in South Carolina also share a lot of characteristics with Gatlin.

Margie: Richard actually asked us for photos from our trips to the South; Richard and Erwin visited Charleston when we were down there on tour. They clearly both have an eye for detail. We know they will pick the perfect places.

5. Are there any EXACT lines you’d love to be directly quoted in the screenplay?

Margie: “There were two kinds of people in our town. The stupid, and the stuck.”

Kami: “The right thing and the easy thing are never the same.”

As part of the blog tour, I was asked to read and review Beautiful Darkness. The greatest compliment I can give this story is that I liked it even more than its predecessor Beautiful Creatures. It often happens in series that the first book is great because it’s new and the last book is great because it’s the end, but the middle lacks. I can safely say that that is not the case with the Caster Chronicles. The second installment is more action-packed, more suspenseful, and even more involved with the characters. The magic is greater. The characters are more complex. The world is more evolved. There are layers and layers of story and plot in this book that you won’t expect or be able to predict. No matter how well you think you have the story pegged, it will surprise you. My advice to you is to go out right now and buy a copy. It’s the perfect time, because it’s the weekend. That should give you enough time to finish before the week begins to eat away at your valuable reading time. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.