Review: Beautiful Creatures (Beautiful Creatures #1) by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl

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Title: Beautiful Creatures (Beautiful Creatures #1)
Author: Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl
Genre: Young Adult: Paranormal, Teen
Format: Paperback
Buy: Amazon / The Book Depository / Barnes & Noble

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.

Beautiful Creatures is indeed an epic read that is dark, mysterious and everything like the cover. I honestly, did not expect to like this book at all and expected very little from it. From my past experiences with books that everyone's hyped up about. I always ended up indifferent to it. But this one was an exception that I actually liked, not as much as I wanted to like it. But I liked it enough to give it four stars.

Kami and Margaret wrote the book in such a way that it always seemed gloomy and dark. The atmosphere in the book gave me the creeps. A lot of it. The book had your usual new girl, who has special powers and town boy falls in love with her. Despite that basic Young Adult Paranormal structure, the authors managed to surround that with tons of originality that pretty much filled the entire book till it reached 530 pages.

Lena and Ethan were okay characters that honestly did annoy me sometimes. I even face-palmed myself once in awhile. But they were sweet together and they made me go "aww" sometimes. I was even surprised when the book was told in Ethan's perspective and not Lena's. I'm glad it was the hero this time. It made the book feel really refreshing.

When Lena moves into town, she is immediately disliked and shunned when they all find out that she is the niece of the town shut in. She is bullied not only in school by the students but also by the student's parents. I admired Ethan's tenacity for sticking up for her especially when he is putting his reputation in jeopardy.

The plot and other minor characters were so beautifully built with enough detail and a lot of dialogue to paint the perfect image in any readers mind. I'm amazed at how easily you can go through each page, not only because of the content but because of how easily to read the formatting was. It wasn't one of those books that love squishing a hell lot of paragraphs in one page. This was more breezy and simple.

Overall, I liked Beautiful Creatures, it had dark voodoo magic, magic in general and interesting mythologies that keeps a reader captivated. Despite the length of the book, I still managed to flip through pages and that is a perfect sign of an entertaining and enjoyable book.