Beautiful Creatures by Margie Stohl and Kami Garcia

Beautiful Creatures by Margie Stohl and Kami Garcia
"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."- summary from Amazon

Yes, yes, I know. I'm like 4 years too late to this party, but hey, at least I finally read it (which I mainly did cuz of the movie). I did enjoy this book, but not as much as many others have. I didn't think it was absolutely amazing, but it was pretty good.

Stohl and Garcia do a great job making the setting come alive through their prose, and that really makes the book, I think. It pulls you in and lets you be part of the story. All the mythology behind everything was explained very well and I was never confused by anything. Learning along with Ethan was a good way to let everything unravel before the reader. I also loved that this was a paranormal book being told from a guy's perspective as opposed to the girl.

I will say that another thing that initially put me off reading the book was the length. Yes, I love reading with a passion but long books scare me. I feel like it'll take me forever to read and with running the blog, I need to stay ahead and all that jazz. So long books tend to be ignored for a while. And yes, it did take me a while to read this book, but whenever I was reading, I was enthralled and turning pages quickly. What mainly took so long was just fitting it into my reading schedule and just getting it from the library (it was always on hold). It didn't feel like a long book at all.

This is a great book and I'll definitely be reading the sequel, which I actually have an ARC of because when I was at BEA 2010, they were trying to get rid of the last few on the final day and my friends and I happened to be walking by so I grabbed a copy. I'm excited to see where the story goes next!

FTC: Received hardcover from library. Link above is an Amazon Associate link; any profit goes toward funding contests.