Beautiful Creatures

Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia and Margie Stohl, 563 pages, 17 hours on audio

Popular basketball player Ethan Wate has been having a series of disturbing dreams about an unknown girl, and it isn’t until the first day of school that he realizes that the mysterious new girl, niece of the town’s resident hermit, is the girl from his dreams. But something’s odd about Lena and her weird family. As Ethan falls for the girl, he gets entangled in her family's paranormal power struggle.

Some things I liked about this book:

• Lena is a strong female character in a YA paranormal romance. Yay! Something about her reminds me of Diana Bishop in A Discovery of Witches, but, you know, teenage and southern.
• More strong female characters! Creole tarot-card reader and substitute grandma Amma is awesome, as is uber-researcher librarian Marian. Too bad the makers of the movie (which I had to see for class) thought that Viola Davis, though a wonderful actress, could combine these two women into one. Lame. But since we're talking about the book here, good job authors on creating two great supporting characters in them.
• Seeing things from the guy's point of view was kinda cool. He wasn't nearly as googly-eyed as some teen paranormal romance protagonists (*cough*bella*cough*), which was nice.
• I liked how this ended. Granted, it's the first book in a series, but the way this one left off was intriguing enough that I'll pick up the others.

 Some things I didn't like:

• The authors named the librarian Marian? Seriously??? I half expected a rendition of "76 Trombones" to start playing in the middle of the book.
• The other minor characters had pretty dumb names too. The stuck-in-the-Confederacy history teacher was named Mr. Lee (no relation) and the English teacher's name is... get ready for it... Mrs. English. Way to get creative there, Kami and Margie. Yeesh.
• I listened to the downloadable audiobook of this, which wasn't too bad. The narrator's voice for Ethan was pretty good, though the other male characters all had the same "southern yokel" voice. Also, toward the end Ethan gets knocked out and Lena takes over the narration. It was a bit jarring to suddenly have a lovely southern female voice telling the story, which I don't think would have been so surprising if I'd been reading it in a traditional book.
• Also specific to the audiobook: there's a song that keeps reappearing throughout the book and plays a pretty decent role in the story (which must be why the filmmakers cut it out of the movie). The song on the audiobook was horrid. It reminded me of bad 80s fantasy movies. And now I have it stuck in my head again, so I probably shouldn't have mentioned it at all.

Last thing: If you've seen the movie and thought it was horrible, you're right. There were times when I was watching it where I thought, "Well, the characters have the same names, and the setting is similar, but I don't think this is really the same story at all." So if you're going to experience Beautiful Creatures, read the book, don't see the movie. And now I'll step down off my soapbox.