Beautiful Creatures (Beautiful Creatures, Book 1)
by Kami Garcia, Margaret Stohl
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Book Summary Information
Author: Kami Garcia, Margaret StohlBrand: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-12-01
ISBN: 0316042676
Number of pages: 563
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780316042673
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of Beautiful Creatures (Beautiful Creatures, Book 1)
Book Review: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Summary: 5 Stars
Living in small town is hard, especially if your desperate to get out. It's even harder when you wake up and realize the small town you live in houses magic, powers, and witches. It probably doesn't help that the girl your falling in love with for the first time is said witch.
The novel starts out with the narrator, Ethan Wate, describing the small town of Gatlin, South Carolina. He was born and raised there, as were several generations of his family before him. Ethan even still lives in the family's old plantation, dating back to the Civil War. Unlike everyone in this miniscule town, Ethan wants more than anything to get out of it. He hates it, and counts down the 2 years left till college. Ethan has a father that barely exists, he's a fiction writer (gothic literature), he writes throughout the night in his study and spends his days sleeping on the couch in there, as well. He hasn't been the same since Ethan's mother died in a car crash several months before. Because of this horrible juncture in the Wate family, Ethan and his father rarely communicate.
Ethan, however, isn't alone in his growing up, he has a woman who looks after the house and after him. Her name is Amma, and she's an older lady (though she always states that she's 53 year old.) She takes care of Ethan as a grandmother would, scolds him when he needs scolding, and loves him just as a maternal figure should. He's grateful for her and even a little bit scared of her. She has a southern eerie charm about her. When she's in one of her "dark" moods, she talks in riddles almost, and creates dolls (not ones you would play with), even makes certain "charms", my guess would be to keep evil at bay.
Beyond that, Ethan lives a pretty normal life. He's popular in school, he's on the basketball team, has friends, (although only one is his actual go-to best bud), gets good grades without even trying. And yet with all of this, Ethan doesn't seem to even care about it. He wants something more, something different, a way out.
When he sleeps, his dreams are always the same, they've been that way for months. He dreams of girl trying to grab hold of him, he's trying to save her from falling. In this dream he smells rosemary and lemons, he hears her voice, even sees her. But when he wakes up, that's when the weirdness comes out. He wakes up to the smell of rosemary and lemons, and being caked with dirt, almost as if he was actually acting out this dream in real life, fighting for someone he's never met. A song appears on his iPod, a creepy one he's never heard before, and then mysteriously disappears.
And then Lena Duchanne comes to town, she's new and completely troubled. She literally sets a storm onto the town. Ethan is drawn to her immediately, just by looking at her he knows she's the girl he's trying to save in his dreams. But how is this possible?
Lena isn't your ordinary "emotional" teen girl. She's a Caster, (a more specific term for witch), her whole family are Casters, as well. Lena carries a huge burden, on her 16th birthday she is to be "claimed", meaning she finds out if the magic she possesses is Light or Dark, good or bad.
Ethan is the one person that can keep Lena safe until her fate is decided. It's a beautifully crafted love story. Showing that when you do find the person who's meant for you, you do everything in your power to keep any harm coming to them.
I enjoyed this book thoroughly, it was a breath of fresh air from the teen vampire/werewolf craze. It's a novel thick in history, magic, and spirit. Garcia and Stohl set the story in the South, added the Civil War to it, and then laced it with the supernatural.
The book has a lot to take in, different settings, and many different characters. But, the story works. Each character has a distinct personality, each has a voice that you can almost hear. The description is fantastic, makes you feel as if you're there watching everything happen.
I recommend Beautiful Creatures to anyone who wants to read something unique and breathtaking. Once you start it, you won't be able to put it down!
Summary of Beautiful Creatures (Beautiful Creatures, Book 1)
Lena Duchannes is unlike anyone the small Southern town ofEthan 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
In a town with no surprises, one secret could change everything.
Ethan Wate is struggling to hide his apathy for his high school "in" crowd in small town Gatlin, South Carolina, until he meets the determinedly "out" Lena Duchannes, the girl of his dreams (literally--she has been in his nightmares for months). What follows is a smart, modern fantasy--a tale of star-crossed lovers and a dark, dangerous secret. Beautiful Creatures is a delicious southern Gothic that charms you from the first page, drawing you into a dark world of magic and mystery until you emerge gasping and blinking, wondering what happened to the last few hours (and how many more you're willing to give up). To tell too much of the plot would spoil the thrill of discovery, and believe me, you will want to uncover the secrets of this richly imagined dark fantasy on your own. --Daphne Durham
Amazon Exclusive Interview with Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl, Authors of Beautiful Creatures
Margie: The best way to describe our writing process is like a running stitch. We don't write separate chapters, or characters. We pass the draft back and forth constantly, and we actually write over each other's work, until we get to the point where we truly don't know who has written what.
Kami: By the end of the book, we don't even know. The classic example is when I said, "Marg, I really hate that line. It has to go." And she said, "Cut it. You wrote it."
Margie: I think we were friends for so long before we were writing partners that there was an unusual amount of trust from the start.
Kami: It's about respect. And it helps that we can't remember when who wrote the bad line.
Margie: We save our big fights for the important things, like the lack of ice in my house or how cold our office is. And why none of my YouTube videos are as popular as the one of Kami's three-fingered typing?okay, that one is understandable, given the page count for "Beautiful Creatures."
Kami: What can I say? I was saving the other seven fingers for the sequel.
What kinds of books do you like to read?Kami: I read almost exclusively Young Adult fiction, with some Middle Grade fiction thrown in for good measure. As a Reading Specialist, I work with children and teens in grades K-12, so basically I read what they read.
Margie: When I write it comes from the same place as when I read: wanting to hang out with fictional characters in fictional worlds. I identify more as a reader than a writer; I just have to write it first so I can read it.
What books/authors have inspired you?Kami: "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee, "A Good Man is Hard to Find & Other Stories" by Flannery O'Connor, "Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury and "The Witching Hour" by Anne Rice. I also love Pablo Neruda.
Margie: I think Harper Lee is the greatest writer alive today. Eudora Welty is my other Southern writer kindred; I was obsessed with her in grad school. Susan Cooper and Diana Wynne Jones made me love fantasy, and my favorite poets are Emily Dickinson (at Amherst College, I even lived on her street) and Stevie Smith.
Did you set out to write fiction for young adults? Why?Kami: We actually wrote "Beautiful Creatures" on a dare from some of the teen readers in our lives.
Margie: Not so much readers as bosses.
Kami: Looking back, we wrote it sort of like the serialized fiction of Charles Dickens, turning in pages to our teen readers every week.
Margie: And by week she means day.
Kami: When we were getting texts in the middle of the night from teens demanding more pages, we knew we had to finish.
Margie: As it says in our acknowledgements, their asking what happened next changed what happened next. Teens are so authentic. That's probably why we love YA. Even when it's fantasy, it's the emotional truth.
A lot of us voracious readers like to cast a book after reading it. Did you guys have a shared view of who your characters are? Did each of you take a different character to develop, or did you share every aspect?Kami: We've never cast our characters, but we definitely know what they look like. Sometimes we see actors in magazines and say, "Lena just wore that!"
Margie: We create all our characters together, but after a point they became as real as any of the other people we know. We forget they're not.
Kami: I never thought of it like that. I guess we do spend all our time talking about imaginary people. Margie: So long as it's not to them?
Did you always plan to start the book with Ethan's story? Why?Kami: We knew before we started that we wanted to write from a boy's point of view. Margie and I both have brothers?-six, between us-?so it wasn't a stretch. It's an interesting experience to fall in love with the guy telling the story rather than the guy the story is about.
Margie: We do kind of love Ethan, so we wanted there to be more to him than just the boy from boy meets girl.
Kami: He's the guy who stands by you at all costs and accepts you for who you are, even if you aren't quite sure who that is.
What is on your nightstand now?Kami: I have a huge stack, but here are ones at the top: "Mama Dip's Kitchen," a cookbook by Mildred Council, "The Demon's Lexicon" by Sarah Rees Brennan, "Shadowed Summer" by Saundra Mitchell, "Rampant" by Diana Peterfreund, and an Advanced Reader Copy of "Sisters Red" by Jackson Pearce.
Margie: I have Robin McKinley's "Beauty," Maggie Stiefvater's "Ballad," Kristen Cashore's "Fire," Libba Bray's "Going Bovine," and "Everything Is Fine" by AnnDee Ellis. And now I'm mad because I know a) Kami stole my "Rampant" and b) didn't tell me she has "Sisters Red"!
What is your idea of comfort reading?Kami: If given the choice, I'll always reach for a paranormal romance or an urban fantasy. I also re-read my favorite books over and over.
Margie: It's all comfort reading to me. I sleep with books in my bed. Like a dog, only without the shedding and the smelling.
Have you written the next book already? What's next for Lena and Ethan?Margie: We are revising the next book now. I don't want to give too much away, but summer in Gatlin isn't always a vacation.
Kami: I would describe book two as intense and emotional. For Ethan and Lena, the stakes are even higher.
Margie: That's true. Book two involves true love, broken hearts, the Seventeenth Moon, and cream-of-grief casseroles?
Kami: Gatlin at it's finest!
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