Beautiful Creatures

Title: Beautiful Creatures

Series: Caster Chronicles - book 1

Authors: Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl

Rating: 4.5 stars

Genre: Young Adult Paranormal

Number of Pages: 563

Publication Date: 2009

Publisher: Little Brown Books

I have been wanting to read this book since the movie came out in 2013. I saw the trailer for the movie and was hooked, then I found out it was a book and wanted to read the story first. So I FINALLY got round to reading it; it's been a slow at uni, so I also watched the movie.

Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl is the story of boy meets girl. Ethan Wate lives in small town Gatlin where the same boring things happen day in and day out. That is until Lena Duchannes moves to town. Lena is the niece of the town recluse, Macon Ravenwood, and as an outsider to this small community Lena quickly becomes the target of small mindness and is accused of being a devil worshiping witch. But Ethan isn't concerned with what anyone in town has to say about Lena, all he wants to know is why he has been dreaming about her months...when he has never meet her before...

I loved the plot of this book, I found it unique and different. While the story is a little slow to begin with, the writing itself is fluent and easy to get dragged into. Once the story really got going I found this book impossible to put down and the last 100 pages completely flew by. The magic in this book was done in a fantastic way, it was different but not to the point that you got an information dump.

The characters in this book were well done as well and I loved the comparison that were made between the characters in the story and those of To Kill a Mockingbird because some of these characters definitely shared the small mindedness of this classic. The character development of Ethan was well done, he grew and learnt gradually and stumbled along a bit to, which was nice. It's no fun when the character just suddenly knows who they need to be. Ethan and Lena are characters that have definitely been given a lot of thought and filled with the right amount of background depth that all great characters share.

As for the movie adaptation, while parts of the story were different or outright changed, I still thoroughly enjoyed the movie and would recommend it if you liked the book.

I really loved this book so I am giving it 4.5 stars and I can't wait to read the rest of the Caster Chronicles.