‘Beautiful Creatures’ a paranormal fantasy for young adults
Nothing much ever happens in the small town of Gatlin, S.C.
Ethan Wate has been counting the days until he graduates high school and can escape this place, where everyone knows everyone else’s business and people are scared to be themselves.
Ethan has had a rough time. With his mom recently killed in a car accident, he has become more dependent on the family’s housekeeper, Amma, whose magical ways he has lived with all his life but whose power isn’t enough to help Ethan’s father rise out of his grief.
Not only does Ethan suffer his own sorrow and long for his dad to emerge from his study, but he’s plagued by haunting dreams as well — dreams of a beautiful girl who seems just out of reach.
Soon his dream becomes a reality, and the town becomes abuzz, as Lena Duchannes, the niece of Gatlin’s resident recluse, moves in with her uncle.
Lena charms Ethan at once. He knows she’s the girl from his dreams and he suspects there’s something special about her, aside from her not fitting the Gatlin cookie-cutter image of a Southern belle.
The two form a strong bond that quickly is put to the test as the town rejects Lena for being a weird outsider and then turns on Ethan for his association with her.
Though that’s enough drama for any teenager, Lena has much bigger problems.
She confides to Ethan that her family has magical powers, and that at the age of 16 she will be claimed by the Light or the Dark, as have all of her family members since the Civil War.
As her birthday draws closer, Lena and Ethan try desperately to uncover the secrets of her heritage and find the possible link that connects them, anything to save Lena from the Dark.
“Beautiful Creatures” by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl is definitely a book for the “Twilight” crowd. A supernatural fantasy centering around a teen love story, it will keep high school girls turning pages.
While anything that gets teens reading instead of texting is a good thing, this book does have some flaws.
The authors repeatedly describe Gatlin and the South as a backwater, xenophobic place where the Civil War still is called the War Between the States and everyone participates in re-enactments. Their heavy-handed, repetitious depiction of the South becomes tedious and cliche.
Everyone in Gatlin County was related to the wrong side in the War Between the States. We were used to that by now. It was like being born in Germany after World War II, being from Japan after Pearl Harbor, or America after Hiroshima. History was a bitch sometimes.
Perhaps the closed-mindedness ascribed to Gatlin rings true for some small cities — anywhere in the country — but the condemnation of the South by the mocking of regional pride that has become so rooted because of that very ridicule will certainly raise the hackles of some Southern readers, who I doubt compare themselves to Nazi descendants.
The other big problem I had with this book was the main character. While enjoyable to have a male protagonist, Ethan so clearly was created by adult women he comes across as completely unrealistic. Much like “Twilight’s” Edward, Ethan’s dedication to his love interest is above and beyond the attention span of your average video-game playing teenage boy. While it’s a wonderful romantic notion with a “Romeo and Juliet” feel to it, the love story revolves around a small-town teen who plays sports and dates the most popular girl in school only to say, “To hell with popularity, I’m going to date this girl everyone thinks is a freak.” Probably not going to happen.
But of course that’s what fantasy fiction is all about: Dreams come true, bad trumps evil, and that snobby little cheerleader always gets hers in the end.
Young adult readers easily will overlook these flaws and devour this story like a big bowl of chocolate ice cream. It’s a love story every girl hopes to make her own, and the paranormal twist will make it irresistible to those with “Twilight” fever.
And the authors are banking on that. “Beautiful Creatures” is the first in “The Caster Chronicles” series.
