Book Review: Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl

Review: Beautiful Creatures
Series: Caster Chronicles – Book 1
Author: Kami Garcia; Margaret Stohl
No of Pages: 563
Release Date: 1 December 2009

In Ethan Wate’s hometown there lies the darkest of secrets...

There is a girl.
Slowly, she pulled the hood from her head...green eyes, black hair.
Lena Duchannes.

There is a curse.
On the Sixteenth Moon, of the Sixteenth Year, the Book will take what it’s been promised.
And no one can stop it.

In the end, there is a grave.

Lena and Ethan become bound together by a deep, powerful love. But Lena is cursed and, on her sixteenth birthday, her fate will be decided.
Ethan never even saw it coming.

My Thoughts:

Five hundred and sixty three pages later and I still don’t know what is going on.

Beautiful Creatures follows the story of Ethan Wate a boy living in a small town called Gatlin. He meets a girl at school and is in a way attracted to her. He feels he should help her because she has been shunned by the entire town for being the niece of Macon Ravenwood, a decidedly crazy shut in who hasn’t been seen in years.

One afternoon whilst spending time with Lena, Ethan finds a locket near her house. When they both touch it something weird happens and they are shown a memory from a different time. Ethan and Lena must figure out what the locket is trying to tell them before Lena’s sixteenth birthday.

That little narration is about as much as I can discern from reading Beautiful Creatures. It took three hundred pages for us to be told that Lena is a Caster (witch) and for the entire novel we were walking up and down Gatlin’s eight streets skipping school and playing with lockets they were told to bury.

Ethan’s narration is boring. How can a book so long contain so little? If you chop out the first four hundred pages I would have loved it because then Lena’s family comes to town, her completely dysfunctional half crazy, half evil family. Only then does anything happen and even that doesn’t really add too much to furthering the plot.

It has honestly taken me so long to write this review just because I am wondering what to say about Beautiful Creatures at all.

Gatlin is a backwards country town full of intolerable people unwilling to change or even budge in their views. It reminded me of To Kill a Mockingbird. Beautiful Creatures was an updated version of TKAM with a paranormal aspect thrown in.

Lena is a moody drama queen. She’ll lose her temper and blow up a window and then go on for days about how she thinks she is going to go Dark (evil). And yet I still can’t get a clear picture of what she looks like in my head, because throwing tantrums and running off was all she ever did.

I couldn’t see how Lena and Ethan developed a “deep, powerful love” it just wasn’t written in there. He chased her around for most of the book, annoyed her uncle by letting himself into their house uninvited and caused more trouble than what was needed by not listen to Amma his caretaker and getting rid of the weird obviously evil locket that kept showing him clips from the past.

Beautiful Creatures has been raved about constantly but I am seriously finding it hard to see the attraction. Nearly 600 pages and nothing has been answered, and I am not keen to find out.

Also in this series:

Beautiful Darkness

Book Review: Hush: An Irish Princess' Tale by Donna Jo Napoli

Review: Hush: An Irish Princess’ Tale

Author: Donna Jo Napoli

No. Of Pages: 340

Release Date: 21 October 2008

A SILENT GIRL. AN AWESOME POWER.

Melkorka is an Irish Princess, the first daughter of a magnificent kingdom – but this all changes the day she is kidnapped and taken aboard a marauding slave ship. Trapped in a world both unfamiliar and cruel, Melkorka finds that her powerlessness gives her clarity. That she is master of what she says. Choosing to take a vow of silence, Melkorka becomes an object of fascination to her captors. And then she realizes that any power, no matter how little, can make a difference.

My Thoughts:

The synopsis promises such an adventurous tale. It lied.

Hush is based on a Scandinavian story about a slave who wouldn’t talk, when she was finally overheard speaking Gaelic to her two year old son one day and asked of her story she told her master that she was an Irish princess before her captor, this is where Hush stems from, her journey into slavery.

I’m still having mixed feelings about Hush. Melkorka isn’t a strong character at all, she is a brat in my opinion. Her eight year old sister Brigid was a better character, pity she only stayed for the first half.

The book was made up of three parts, part one was in Ireland or Eire as the book refers to it, the second is on the boat of her first captor, the third on the boat of the man who buys her.

There is a clear difference in the quality of the story during the three parts. The first part of the story I was completely disappointed in, the writing was poor and disjointed. The timeline wasn’t clearly expressed so we were jumping erratic periods of time with no notice, it was only until you had to re-read and work out that you were a month or a week ahead.

The second part of the story was better written, like the author walked away for a few years and came back after writing more novels so had a bit more of a grip on her writing. By the time we got to the third part, which I had to force myself to get to, the story picked up and completely engrossed me because I had to know what happened.

Melkorka like I said was portrayed as a weak brat. She’s a fifteen year old princess (which is considered old enough for the time) who doesn’t have a brain in her head. Her eight year old sister was a wonderful character for the time she spent in the pages of the book, Brigid was smart, compassionate, quick-witted and resourceful. Melkorka on the other hand is the complete opposite, she really isn’t a likeable character. It took her until the third part of the book until she accepted being a slave and started acting like one, instead of a princess. Fair enough that she grew up as a princess but letting the other slaves wash you on a ship? That’s a bit much in my opinion.

Even the Hush bit, the whole point of the story wasn’t her idea, it was Brigid’s, and when Brigid left the story it was another slave that told her to keep her mouth shut.

This story didn’t take me on a journey which I thought might happen, because I adore novels about the old sailing ships of which this novel was primarily set on.

It was the other characters that made this story for me. Brigid in particular, if there were a story about Brigid I would definitely read it. Maeve, one of the slaves was another interesting character, she is a mystery, she knows so much about all of the countries they go to and is quick witted. Gilli, or Clay Man as Melkorka refers to him, is another good character, he is the one who originally kidnaps her, and it is interesting to read about his suspicions of Melkorka.

So overall when I sum up the story in my head, it isn’t a memorable one, but the secondary characters make it interesting and worth the read.

2/5