[Review] Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl

There were no surprises in Gatlin County.
We were pretty much the epicenter of the middle of nowhere.
At least, that's what I thought.
Turns out, I couldn't have been more wrong.
There was a curse.
There was a girl.
And in the end, there was a grave.
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.

I loved this book, which actually surprised me (the length made me think there was a whole lot of unnecessary stuff). My friend has been telling me to read this for a really long time, and I kept procrastinating when I saw that it was 563 pages long. I finally did get it, but it still took me a couple months to get up the courage to read it >.<

Vocabulary:

Caster: A caster has powers, although each caster has their powers focused in a certain area. There are healers, people who can LOOK like other things (illusionists), people who can look at a place and see through time periods (how the place was in the past and the present), etc.

On their 16th birthday, a caster chooses to be either dark or light.

Also, anything highlighted in white so you can't see it are spoilers...

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So the plot is pretty much that Lena is a caster and she's a very, very powerful one. She's also the related to the most powerful dark caster. She's 15 and she's afraid that she's going to be a dark caster because a long time ago, her ancestor was cursed. The curse specifies that all of her descendants will be chosen to be light or dark by a really old book- they won't have a choice like most casters. This book is pretty much about Ethan and Lena, and how Serafine (the dark caster) keeps trying to kill Lena, and how they avoid it.

The characters are pretty well rounded, and since this book is in Ethan's point of view, you don't go through the confusion of switching POVs, and we get to know a lot about Ethan, with out all the information seeming forced. You are also able to understand a lot about some of the less important characters, such as Link (Ethan's best friend) and Amma (Ethan's housekeeper). The characters are all pretty awesome, though, especially Lena's uncle, Macon Ravenwood XD

For some entirely random reason, my favorite character was Macon Ravenwood.  And then, they KILLED him. Really, why did they have to do that? <--- that was rhetorical by the way. I suppose I understand why someone had to die, and why it was Macon, but REALLY.  He was the most amazing character! (to me) I suppose if I asked other people they'd say Lena, Ethan, or some other equally important character :-/ I guess Macon being nocturnal made Ethan call him a vampire but still T_T Macon did not deserve to die by any stretch of the word.

Anyway, you should definitely read this when you can, and I will be reading the next book soon :D

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