The Damned by Renée Ahdieh is the sequel to The Beautiful and it's being released today July 7th! The Beautiful was one of my favorite books of 2019 and I was so excited to get a chance to read and review the sequel before it's release. As I stated in my Best Books of 2019 post, The Beautiful sees the re-emergence of vampires in YA novels, and this is confirmed in The Damned. We finally get to see the events of the story happening from the point of view of some of the vampires and we get to know more about their history. I was absolutely stunned by the atmosphere of the novel, the flowery descriptions it was filled with. I also enjoyed getting to see more of the "war" between the vampires and werewolves of New Orleans, and it made me have some serious Twilight flashbacks. One of my favorite parts in the book was when one of the characters we were already familiar with from The Beautiful came out as sapphic and I think it's super important to normalize queer characters in historical fantasies. 

As soon as I picked up this book, I could not put it down until I had finished reading it. No spoilers but this book contained one of my favorite tropes from YA fantasy novels, but I've really only seen it done before with white characters, so it was exciting to see a character of color rise to those same heights.    While currently the series seems to be only a duology, the ending of The Damned definitely left room for more and I hope we get to see it at some point!