Review: Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl

Set in the lushly drawn deep south of America, Beautiful Creatures is the tale of forbidden love between a mortal and a ‘Caster’. It’s Bella and Edward with swamps, voodoo, and confederate history, and the not-so-subtle twist that the whole story is told from the male mortal point of view with the dangerous supernatural love interest being female.

Ethan Wate, the sixteen year old, only son of a recently deceased professorial mother and a writer father who has surrendered to grief, is ticking off the days until he can graduate from school and leave the stifling environment of small town, Gatlin. Lena Duchannes is the mysterious new girl at school, niece of Macon Ravenwood, Gatlin’s mysterious shut-in, who lives in the town’s oldest building, which also happens to be one of the only two buildings that survived the fires that wiped out the rest of the town in the American civil war.

Ethan and Lena are drawn inexplicably to each other: he has solid southern antecedents and is accepted without question into the local community of Daughters of the American Revolution and their quiescent husbands; she is shunned, an outsider, who neither dresses nor acts the right way and drives a hearse to school.  Why they should be connected is a mystery, until, piece by piece they discover their common history and another tale of forbidden love played out as Gatlin burned.

This is a heavily textured book. The sounds, smells, humidity of the south are almost tangible. Anything seems possible in this claustrophobic hothouse and it takes little suspension of disbelief to be swept away by the outrageous actions of the town’s bigots, the voodoo charms and prayers used by Amma (who looks after Ethan), and even the spells cast by Lena’s Caster family.

 I found it harder, though, to be swept away by Ethan. This is a basketball jock who reads. Now, I confess that I don’t know how one of these would sound, but I can’t help but think that he would be more likely to opine on who should play point guard than the quantity of taffeta comprising the cheerleaders’ prom dresses or the number of bobby pins in their hair. Ethan just doesn’t come across as a sixteen year old boy, which makes the very end of the book, when the point of view switches between him and Lena, quite difficult to follow: their voices are just too similar.

Bizarrely, the love story still works in spite of this, possibly because Lena is very well drawn and the environment and atmosphere are so convincing. Essentially this is a reworking of the Romeo and Juliet story, but with large amounts of Confederate history and something akin to race hatred thrown in. As such it prompts interesting analogies with the civil rights movement and is undoubtedly revealing about the psyche of the deep south.

Originally written for writeaway.org.uk