Beautiful Creatures

Overall Rating: 6.5/10

Summary: Gatlin County is the epitome of your stereotypical southern no-where town. Ethan Wate's parents lived in Gatlin, as did his grand parents, and his great grand parents, and... you get the idea. Ethan is determined to be the one to break the cycle, but he's got another 2 years of school before he can go anywhere. And being on the Jackson High basketball team, popular, and living with a single father he never sees, it seems Ethan is too immersed with the middle of nowhere to ever leave. He doesn't want to be one of them, but he is.

At least, until the day Lena Duchanness shows up. She changes everything for him. So completely different from everyone in the cookie-cutter town, Ethan is drawn to her like a moth to a light. Everyone thinks this attraction is unhealthy. No one should be so close to the niece of the town's shut-in, Macon Ravenwood. The guys on the basketball team disapprove. The DAR (a proud women's group of patriot blood) disapproves.  Amma, the woman who has looked after Ethan as she might her own son, disapproves. Even Lena herself doesn't like the attention.

At first.

Ethan and Lena deal with the cruel stereotypes of the small town as they discover things about themselves and their own pasts that may have been better to have kept undiscovered.

Opinion: This book wasn't a disaster, but it did fail to leave a real impression on me. That might be because it follows the typical paranormal book these days, or that I'm not big on books placed in the Southern States (or at least ones that go over the top with embracing their southern heritage... bleh, Civil War!) or it may simply have not been very impressing.

This a pretty typical boy-meets girl sort of story. Ethan is a basketball jock whose mother has passed away. He hates the town he lives in and wants to break free of the cycle that is Gatlin. When a mysterious girl shows up, he's drawn to her. Insert some paranormal stuff here. Then they learn the town is much more than they'd ever thought it could be. It's really more of a mystery than it is my typical fantasy/action/adventure book. Stories about high school tend to bore me, however, as I already have to deal with all of the high school drama. 

It isn't necessarily that Beautiful Creatures is a boring or bad book, it's just... too long. There's too much time between one plot point and the next. The scenes with the other high schoolers involved were depressing and, more importantly, unproductive. By the time the climax came I was so ready for the book to be over I skipped every other line. 

The one thing this book really has going for it is that it's told in Ethan's perspective. It was refreshing to read a paranormal/romance type story from the guy's perspective. (although if I think about it I haven't really read that many paranormal/romance stories period...)

Title: I really liked this title. It seems rather vague for most of the story, but there is a scene in which Macon sort of explains it, and after that I appreciated it even more.

Cover: I also thought that this cover was eye-catching, but I didn't really understand how it related to the book. I've a couple of ideas, but the picture is too vague to really refer to anything, in my opinion. 

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I guess my mind took a break from reality last week, because not only did I fail to post last Sunday, I neglected Wednesday as well. Gahhh! It's hard to keep things straight in my head sometimes. I just need to get in the habit of it, I think. If I remember I'll try and post tomorrow to make up for last week.

We'll see if my blender of a mind will manage to remember.

MJ