Beautiful Creatures, by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl
Ethan lives in Gaitlin, South Carolina, where nothing changes. Every one in school and in town is locked into the same routine and prejudiced about anything that doesn’t fit neatly into their world. Ethan apathetic about the town and the people, following along with the routine until leave town when he hits eighteen.
In the meantime, he’s having nightmares about trying to save a girl from falling. They are so vivid that when he wakes up, the mud from gripping the earth is still under his finger nails when he wakes up.
When Lena, the niece of the town shut-in, moves into town, Ethan immediately recognizes her as the girl from his dreams. With her arrival Ethan becomes wrapped up in strange happenings, a secret world of magic that has always lived in Gaitlin, including casters, spirits, and an ancient curse.
I do like how the novel is strongly set in its location, very clearly the south with its swamps and heat and southern manors. However, I have mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, I liked Ethan and Lena, and felt for them as they dealt with the prejudice that the town rails against Lena.
On the other hand — and this is a personal taste thing — I don’t buy into the fated-lovers trope, in which two people (a la Twilight) connect with each other immediately and never really deviate in their love. They have fights and set backs, of course, but you know from “first sight” that they are going to be together. Their personalities sort of dissolve into each other, and their whole life and interests become just about that other person. Though this less so in Beautiful Creatures than in Twilight, as both Ethan and Lena seems to be more multi-dimensional characters than Bella and Edward. They do have problems other than each other, like Ethan facing the lingering effects of his mother’s death from several years before.
The writing is good in the book, and though it was long, the story managed to carry me along very well. In fact, it keep me going, as Ethan and Lena searched for a solution to the curse and with the nastiness of the students and parents in the town, that it kept me up a couple of nights, because I needed to know what happened next.
Though, I also had issues with the curse, which along with the love story, is the main focus of the novel. The curse set the casters and the mythology very clearly along the lines of good/evil without much room for grey area, which is annoying to me. I don’t want to get into the details, but this evil/good dynamic made me deeply uncomfortable on several occasions. But fortunately the book resolved that well in a way that allowed for more grey area, which was satisfactory to me.
In fact, the resolution made me even more interested in Lena. Though I really hope that book two in the series is from Lena’s point of view this time. I liked Ethan and his view point, but I would like to see a different perspective. I’ll get around to reading the second book eventually, I’m sure, but due to the issues I had with the first book, it may take me a while to come back to it.
[Cross-posted my livejournal.]
