Beautiful Creatures

Beautiful Creatures, by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl.

It had made sense when a beautiful girl was saying it. Now that I was back home, alone, and in my own bed, I was finally losing it. Even Link wouldn't believe any of this. I tried to think about how the conversation would go - the girl I like, whose real name I don't know, is a witch - excuse me, a Caster, from a whole family of Casters, and in five months she's going to find out essentially if she's good or evil. And she can cause hurricanes indoors and break the glass out of windows. And I can see into the past when I touch the crazy locket Amma and Macon Ravenwood, who isn't actually a shut-in at all, want me to bury. A locket that materialized on the neck of a women in a painting at Ravenwood, which by the way, is not a haunted mansion, but a perfectly restored house that changes completely every time I go there, to see a girl who burns me and shocks me and shatters me with a single touch.

And I kissed her. And she kissed me back.

It was too unbelievable, even for me.

First off: how have I not heard of this series?! This book, the first out of four books, was published in 2009, and the film version of it is coming out next week, on Valentine's Day (Feb. 14). I ran to buy the book before my flight last week and then started it on the way home, and was immediately enthralled ... this will be the next Twilight, in my opinion, except it's much better written and it's a combination of the supernatural (witches, or Casters) meets Harry Potter meets Twilight, at least in the love story sense.

Ethan Wate lives in the small town of Gatlin, South Carolina, where life is boring and nothing ever changes. When Lena Duchannes (pronounced "Dukane") comes to town, however, he realizes that she's the girl he has - literally - been dreaming of, and they strike up a friendship, which quickly turns to something more. She has a problem, though: her 16th birthday is coming up, where she will be Claimed either by the Light or the Dark; she has no choice in the matter. Her cousin, Ridley, recently went Dark, and is now shunned by the family. Ethan must help Lena try to figure out a way around going Dark and in the process, he learns that perhaps Gatlin isn't the sleepy town he once thought it was - everyone's keeping secrets, and some of them will surprise you.

The other books in the series are Beautiful Darkness, Beautiful Chaos, and Beautiful Redemption, and the last one just recently was published. I'm definitely hooked after the first one, so I plan to read the others at some point. This one was rather long - about 500 pages - but I whipped through it in two days because it was that good.

I'm looking forward to the movie version too - it stars relative unknown actors as Lena and Ethan, but Jeremy Irons stars as Macon, Lena's strange uncle, and Viola Davis as Amma, a librarian and protector of Ethan who was best friends with his mom before she died. At the beginning of this book Ethan's dad is equivalent to a zombie - he hides out in his study all day and is writing a novel, so he says - and the reason he's been so antisocial is Ethan's mother's death about a year earlier.

I've also heard that in the movie version, they combine Amma - Ethan's protector and housekeeper - and Marian, the town librarian; in the book, they're two separate people, but in the movie they've been combined as one character to streamline the film a bit.

5 stars out of 5.