Thursday, January 6, 2011

Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl

From Goodreads: There were no surprises in GatlinCounty. 
We were pretty much the epicenter of the middle of nowhere.
At least, that's what I thought.
Turns out, I couldn't have been more wrong.
There was a curse.
There was a girl.
And in the end, there was a grave.
Lena Duchannes is unlike anyone the small Southern town of Gatlin has ever seen, and she's struggling to conceal her power, and a curse that has haunted her family for generations. But even within the overgrown gardens, murky swamps and crumbling graveyards of the forgotten South, a secret cannot stay hidden forever.
Ethan Wate, who has been counting the months until he can escape from Gatlin, is haunted by dreams of a beautiful girl he has never met. When Lena moves into the town's oldest and most infamous plantation, Ethan is inexplicably drawn to her and determined to uncover the connection between them.
In a town with no surprises, one secret could change everything.

Beautiful Creatures is one of those books where the story is good (great even!) but didn't seem to connect with me. This book is 563 pages long, and I definitely noticed. If a book is great I don't mind the length at all, whether it be 80 pages or 700 pages. Beautiful Creatures dragged for me, I was eager to get to the ending and find out what happens. I felt that the plot stopped moving at certain points and there were just too many 'problems' for Lena and Ethan. The ending was chaotic, there was a lot going on and was 'resolved' in a single chapter (a long chapter mind you). I wish there hadn't been so many 'things' that just popped out with no history, there is a special ring towards the end of the book that had never been mentioned before. If it's so special why weren't the readers introduced to it before? It would've made it's fate and meaning believable for me. Ethan Wate (our narrator) seemed like a great guy, he feels stuck in "middle of nowhere Gatlin" and longs for something different. That 'different' arrives in the form of Lena Duchannes and boy is she different from the other girls, she has black nail polish instead of pink like the "Southern Belles" of the school and she is pale whereas the other girls are orange-y. I love the outfits Lena wears (she wears Chucks very often) and she writes all the time. She has never fit in, even at her past schools so she showed a lot of courage in being the 'new' girl, which at a small town like Gatlin is pretty fierce. On top of all of that, she moves in with her uncle Macon who is Gatlin's version of Boo Radley as he never leaves his house and is a mysterious figure among Gatlin citizens. Poor Lena, she goes through a lot in this book and poor Ethan can only say "It's going to be ok". I am hoping the next book in the series Beautiful Darkness redeems this series for me, because I really am interested in the fate of both characters and their families.

I give this book 3 owls!


1 comment:

  1. You know, I really wanted to love this book, but I couldn't connect with it either. I'm hoping the second one will be better as well. Great review!

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