When Ethan Wate falls asleep at night, he dreams of a beautiful girl he has never met. He knows they are connected and longs to find out who this mysterious girl is, when lo and behold she walks right into the high school he attends. The bad news is, that Lena, the new girl, has just moved into the oldest plantation house in town and her uncle is the town recluse. So of course, Lena is dismissed as being untouchable and unworthy by the popular girls yet Ethan is drawn to her.
Lena and Ethan soon become friends with potential possibilities of the relationship kind. Ethan soon discovers Lena is different from other girls because she is a castor. A castor is a type of witch. Lena's 16th birthday is approaching and all castors from Lena's family find out if they will be become dark or light. Lena is fretfully worried and rightfully so. One day Ethan and Lena find a powerful talisman on the land of a burned down plantation called Greenbriar and they are transported back in time to the Civil War to witness the house being burned down by union soldiers and the events of their two families 150 years before they were born.
There is a dual storyline in Beautiful Creatures. The first storyline is the modern paranormal high school drama that goes like this; boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, girl needs protecting, boy tries and fails, the adults want to keep them apart and so on. The second storyline takes place during the Civil War. The interplay of the two story lines is what kept me turning the pages. Beautiful Creatures is interesting and unique and it appealing to history buffs and lovers of literature.
Beautiful Creatures is a southern gothic that contains a curse that has lasted generations, a town with a group of people who are a little bit stagnant and a secret that promises to change the status quo. Of course there is a budding romance and creative characters and creatures. With a spooky cemetery, a labyrinth of books and just enough crazy thrown in to keep you guessing. The authors do a good job of slowly revealing the mystery in bits and pieces and keep you coming back for more. Garcia and Stohl write in tandem and are both educators.
This book has been sitting on my shelf for awhile and since the film release is in a week or so, I thought it was about time to read it. Read the book and then see the film tends to be my motto. So I have big plans to see the film and I think Beautiful Creatures has intrigued me enough that I will read the second book and probably the third and maybe the fourth. Will there be a Fifth?
Thank You!