First line: There were only two kinds of people in our town.
I just found out that Beautiful Creatures was made into a movie so I figured I’d write a bit of a review, but then I realized that even though I only read it a month ago, I couldn’t remember much of it. I had to go look through reviews on Goodreads to figure out what I can only assume I blocked from memory.
Here’s a quick summary: Typical popular guy Ethan meets and quickly falls for typical strange outcast Lena. Somewhere along the line, Ethan finds out that Lena isn’t a normal strange girl, but a paranormal strange girl, a Caster (basically a witch). Normally, Casters can choose to be light (good), or dark (bad) on their own, but Lena’s family is cursed. On her 16th birthday, it will be decided for her whether she’s good or evil, and there’s no in-between.
As you can imagine, Lena is terrified that she’ll be “claimed” as a Dark Caster, which would totally suck because she’s a nice girl who wants to be good. I feel for her, I really do. But she spends nearly every moment crying about it and it got to the point where I just didn’t care. I just wanted the claiming to happen already. Yeah, she may turn evil, but at least she’ll shut up about it.
While Lena is freaking out about her 16th birthday, Ethan is freaking out about how horrible the south is. Every classmate and parent was a judgmental asshole, with the exception of his best friend (and even he was pretty dumb). Everyone was nosy, opinionated, and… southern. Apparently, those things go hand in hand.
In the midst of all their freaking out is a bunch of magic crap I can’t remember clearly. Something about a locket that transports them back to a time when Ethan’s great, great, whatever uncle and Lena’s… someone from her family… were in love, but they couldn’t be together. Ethan and Lena watch their ancestors try and fail to be together. Sucks to be them.
Anyway, even though the whole Caster idea was new to me, everything else seemed stale. Popular boy, unhappy with his popularity and his shallow classmates, falls for outcast girl and becomes an outcast himself because his popular friends just don’t understand. Ugh.
And then the ending! No. Just no. Cop out ending only there because they wanted to write more than one book.
Little Vermo Reviews 