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Book Review: Beautiful Creatures

 

           The fact that I am giving a review on this book at all should speak volumes of how well it was written as it is completely out of my comfort zone as far as what genres I go to bed with at night and wake up to the next morning and spend every waking moment trying to get back to it to get back in the plot to see what happens next to my new found friends. Such was the case for me in this book, Beautiful Creatures. I found myself so enveloped with the book that I was actually having nightmares at night after spending half the day reading. Beautiful Creatures captures your emotions very well. Prepare to laugh, to cry, to get angry and to get excited as you go through the school year with Ethan and Lena. Prepare to be misunderstood with the main character and to seek to understand. All in all this book is very well done and deserves an outstanding review.

            1. I don’t normally go for these types of books…

            I don’t normally go for these types of books as I don’t like the dark, demonic, witchcraft, undead, genre. I picked up the book because I knew it was popular and I wanted to see how young adult fiction writers begin the first chapter of their books – what I found was so much more than how to write my “Once upon a time…” What captivated me with this book was the suspense – pages turned with tremendous speed as I needed to know what happened next. The characters were totally relatable to their young audience. Anyone who has ever felt rejected or like an outcast would find a hero-type in Ethan and Lena’s characters. But perhaps the most captivating part of this book was the relationship between the characters were so amazingly well developed that by the end of the book you felt as though they were real people, as though you had spent the school year with Ethan Wate and Lena Duchannes.

           

            2. Avoid the movie…

Word to the simple and the wise – avoid the movie. If you have already watched the movie, forget the movie. The book is an entirely different story and far better and less confusing than the movie is. If you have read the book and not seen the movie, then the movie will only make you mad as you see them drop some of the major plot points and characters (Ethan’s dad is absent altogether through much of the movie, there is no black hearse, and the relationships are so underdeveloped with cheesy acting and poor script writing that I had to turn the movie off in the middle and return it). If you are reading the book and not yet finished, the movie will reveal some plot points that will spoil the experience of the book. So, again, avoid the movie… at least until you are done with the book – you’ll be glad for this advice. The movie also goes out of its way to ridicule the Christian religion to a far greater extent than the book ever did, and amped up the profanity ten times more than was ever used in the book.

            3. Some things I did not like…

            There were some things that I did not appreciate about the book – though perhaps the authors are keeping true to the atmosphere of the South? The language was there and thrown it at understandable times – words like damn and others of the like. The Church is poorly portrayed in this book and Christians are seen, though it is not made too much of, as people who needed to make someone up to believe in. Amma intermingles God with her witchcraft, and so I did not appreciate that either. The book does get dark and there is very little spiritual edification if any to be found in the pages. Again, what kept the pages turning for me was the relationships and the suspense – and I am the type that cannot put the book down after I’ve become ensnared in the plot. So, for spiritual edification, I do not recommend this book – if you are as intense a reader as I am and sensitive to spiritual things, prepare to have nightmares before you finished with the book. But if you are looking for some tips on how to write for the YA audience and how to keep the relationships real in your book that you’re writing, Beautiful Creatures is a good selection.

            4. My conclusion on the matter…

            Again, that I am giving a favorable review on this book should speak volumes as I am turned off to dark books such as this one as one might be turned off to a plate of broccoli that has been overcooked and then microwaved to the point of having become brownish in color. I picked up this book only intending to read the first chapter, but in the first few pages I was hooked until the last page. This is the style (not the content) and the experience that I want to develop into my book that I am currently writing, and if it turns out half as good as Beautiful Creatures did, I shall be glad for it.