Title: Beautiful Creatures
Author(s): Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl
Page Count: 576 pages
Summary: 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. (From Goodreads)
Review: I’m just going to start this review by saying: this book is LONG. I usually read pretty fast, but this took me about two weeks to read, which is very, very rare. It’s strange, because long books never seem daunting to me and I’ve read 1000+ page book in a few days without batting an eyelash. I think it just has to have substance and everything has to matter and it has to keep me entertained.
Beautiful Creatures did that… well, sort of. I’m not going to say I didn’t like it, but I didn’t love it either. It feel between mediocre and good on the scale of book awesomeness. I definitely feel that it was too long; I understand that the romance aspect has to be developed, as did the supernatural, but I don’t think it should’ve been quite as long as it was. There were definitely some things that could’ve been taken out.
That’s not to say that there aren’t things I enjoyed. I liked Lena and her quirks; she and Ethan made a very good couple. I also liked the small-mindedness of the town and the fact that they pretend like the Civil War ended with the South taking the high road. I think that just describes the South ridiculously well; people around where I live wave the Confederate flag as a symbol of southern pride, not as a ‘let-go-lynching’ type of thing.
The things I didn’t like, however, seemed to almost outweigh the things I liked. Like I mentioned before, it was unnecessarily long and most of the characters were like cardboard cutouts, aside from a few like Link and Lena. His father we never really got to know well enough; even his character was a bit cliched.
Overall, Beautiful Creatures had some good parts, but overall I wasn’t blown away with it as a whole.
Rating: 3.5/5 stars
Read Sam, Read! 