Book review: Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl

My edition: Paperback, published in 2010 by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 592 pages.

Description: 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.

Rating:



I'd been in awe of the gorgeous cover of this book for ages and kept getting drawn to it in bookstores, but when I finally decided to read it I found that the cover didn't represent the book at all.

The generic title aside (I think the French title "16 Moons" is much more accurate), the story just lacked the prose or even intrigue the cover suggested.

For the most part I thought the novel was dragged out into an overlong tale where I never really connected or felt interested in any of the characters central in it. The background to the story behind Ethan and Lena is, while not entirely original, surely an interesting one but because the authors do not get to the point until pretty much the last few chapters I simply felt bored throughout.

Also, the guy POV just did not work for me. Don't get me wrong, I don't oppose to reading a story through the eyes of the male perspective but it seemed to me that most of the time the authors just wrote for a girl, because does anyone really know a 16 year-old boy who acts like Ethan does, with his hobbies, likes and dislikes?

It almost makes me wonder if the authors just wanted to be different by shifting the POV and changing the name of the main character after they'd already written the book from a girl's standpoint.