We got snowed in here on the east coast yesterday and I spent much of the day finishing Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl. What a treat! I read the book out of a curiosity that grew from reading a review of the book by The Story Siren. The teaser drew me in:
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.
Based on that, I had no idea what to expect. What I got was phenomenal. My friend who loaned me the book before she even read it (good friend!) asked what it was about when I was about 100 pages into it. “I’m not really sure,” I confessed, “but I really like it.” And I did. The writing was so vivid; I have never been able to so easily visualize characters and settings. It was clear to me why the movie rights to this book were snatched up during its first month of publication.
I do not want to give anything away. For those readers who want to know more, you can of course find any and everything you want to know about the book on the internet. Personally, I liked that I went into the book knowing nothing so everything was a surprise to me. I’m looking forward to getting my own copy for Christmas and slowly rereading it again, taking more time to savor the authors’ writing style.
The fact that Beautiful Creatures is Garcia and Stohl’s first book gives me such hope for the 2010 Debut Author Challenge. If the books on my reading list are even half as good as Beautiful Creatures, I’m in for a very enjoyable 2010!
