Review: Beautiful Creatures by K. Garcia & M. Stohl

Read the original review over at NerdSpan.

Beautiful Creatures (Beautiful Creatures Series #1) by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl. Little, Brown 2009. 563 pgs (paperback). Young Adult, Supernatural fantasy.

Book Summary: In a small South Carolina town, where it seems little has changed since the Civil War, sixteen-year-old Ethan is powerfully drawn to Lena, a new classmate with whom he shares a psychic connection and whose family hides a dark secret that may be revealed on her sixteenth birthday.

Beautiful Creatures is, quite frankly, really good. Most YA fiction is told through the eyes of teenage girls, where whining about boyfriends and cat-fights seems the norm. But Beautiful Creatures (and I’m assuming the rest of the series) is told through the eyes of Ethan Wate, a young boy whose life is about to be changed forever by a new and mysterious girl. The story is set in Gatlin, a fictional small town in South Carolina, where nothing has changed in years. So when a new girl shows up on the first day of school, she is immediately the talk of the town.

The tale begins with a dream, one that has been a recurring nightmare for Ethan, where he’s losing his grip on a girl, the love of his life. He wakes up and finds himself covered in dirt—part of the dream—and immediately decides that it’s a trick of his mind, or some of it flew in through his open window—but why was it open, anyway? Then Ethan goes to school and we meet Link, his best friend. On the way, we also see something that is very important, a black hearse driving down the road. Ethan is instantly intrigued, but doesn’t think much of it past that first glimpse.

School begins. There’s a new girl. Ethan is interested, but not overwhelmed. Finally, he meets the new girl, Lena. She wears a crazy assortment of clothes always paired with her old black Chucks, and a necklace that looks like it’s made from junk—bottle caps, plastic rings, etc. She’s more beautiful than anyone he’s ever met before. She has dark hair and big green eyes, and her skin is paler than snow. To Ethan, she’s perfect, but not everyone sees her that way. To everyone else, especially the popular cheerleaders, she’s a threat.

But soon her beauty and perfection are gone; strange things begin to happen. Ethan begins to hear someone’s thoughts in his head, like they’re talking to him directly. Turns out, it’s Lena speaking to him. Turns out, it’s Lena who’s the girl in his dream. Lena gets so angry one day that the windows shatter in English class, but nobody saw what happened. Ethan learns that Lena is a Caster, which is sort of like a witch, and since she’s coming up on her sixteenth birthday her powers are beginning to show. Soon Ethan realizes that the months leading up to Lena's birthday might be all the time they have together. They dig deep into the past to find out if anything can change her future.

There is a whole cast of characters to love, and hate, in this book. Ethan, Lena, Marian, Macon, Amma, Aunt Del, Reece, Ridley, Larkin, Ryan, Emily, Savannah, Mrs. Lincoln, Link—everyone has an important part in this book. There are literally no characters in here that feel out of place or thrown in for “extra” page space.

The book takes its time getting to the climax, but there is nothing wrong with that. It sets up the plot for the second book quite nicely. The last 100 pages were tremendously fascinating and entertaining. I’m usually pretty good at picking up on the plot twists in YA fiction, but not with this one. The ending literally threw me for a loop.

If you liked Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight or Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire Mysteries (Sookie Stackhouse books), you’ll enjoy Beautiful Creatures. I, for one, am excited to start the next in the series and find out what happens next! I'm also super excited about the movie adaptation coming out February 13th! Watch the movie trailer here!

Changes & Making a To Read Pile

I'm expanding my blogging here from just book reviews to all sorts of non-sense about books, reading, writing, and the life surrounding it. I hope you enjoy it and stick around.

Recently, I've become affiliated with NerdSpan.com as a book reviewer. You can read my first review of Ship of Magic by Robin Hobb here (or simply look in the previous post for part of the review and a link). I've won some free books from Goodreads.com and really like their First Reads program. I'm just now finishing up my first book, Killmaiden's Compendium of Uncommon Occurences by James A Shapiro. I'll post a review later on.

I received a bunch of gift cards for Christmas and guess what? I spent it mostly on books. (Shocker, right?)

My haul (and books I intend to review):

Beautiful Darkness by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl

Cinder by Marissa Meyer

Changeling by Philippa Gregory

Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion

Swamplandia! by Karen Russell

The Illumination by Kevin Brockmeier

Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day by Ben Loory

Sweet! Expect a review of Beautiful Creatures up on NerdSpan soon (I'll also post an excerpt here), followed by Killmaiden's and others. I don't know what I'm reading next. Probably Warm Bodies in anticipation of the movie. :)

I also wanted to talk about my recent applications to grad school for creative writing. I graduated with a Master of Arts in Teaching in May 2012. I didn't find a job, but I have been subbing off and on. It's fun, but not as fulfilling as I'd hoped. I'm sure it would be if a had a full-time gig, but that hasn't panned out yet.

So I applied to four MFA programs (Master of Fine Arts) at University of Alabama, University of Mississippi, Oregon State University, and McNeese State University. Originally I had only wanted to apply to Alabama, but some people on the Draft pointed out that applying to multiple places will slightly increase my chance of being accepted somewhere, and also make those rejections hurt less. Or so I hope. I'll keep you updated on the status of those applications as I receive them. I should hear back from all schools by the end of March.

So while I'm waiting, I've been working on some ideas for novels along the way. It's mostly YA or even adult fantasy, but we'll see. I've been working on something slightly sci-fi lately and I think it's going pretty well. I need to work on it a bit more this weekend.

Well, I think that's all for now. Until next time, guys!

Keep reading.

A Darling Novella

Review: Ship of Magic by Robin Hobb

Originally posted over here at NerdSpan.

Ship of Magic (The Liveship Traders, Book 1) by Robin Hobb. Bantam Books 1998. 685 pages (hardcover). Fantasy. 

Ship of Magic is a good start to a fantasy trilogy. It begins with the awakening of the Tangle, a group of sea serpents, and is a storyline woven throughout the book (and I would guess the entire trilogy) quite nicely. It brings you into the Liveship and Farseer universe tinged with mystery and magic unknown.

This book tells the tales of a wide cast of characters, though its main concern is the Vestrit Family of Bingtown, a lively trading port in a land south of the Six Duchies. Bingtown is a center of exotic trade and home to merchant nobility famed for its liveships. Liveships are vessels carved from wizardwood, which “quickens” magically into awareness after three generations of sailing. The Vestrit family fortunes rest on their newly awakened liveship, Vivacia.

For Althea Vestrit, the ship is her rightful destiny unjustly denied her and she will risk anything to reclaim it. Althea’s nephew Wintrow, who was pulled from his life of priestly training to take her spot, sees his time aboard Vivacia as a life sentence. The fate of the Vestrit family and their liveship may lie in the hands of an outsider, the ruthless and power-hungry pirate, Captain Kennit.

The story can sometimes be slow-going, but overall it was enjoyable. Having read the Farseer Trilogy beforehand, I knew immediately some of the references the characters spoke of, like the “red war” or the “mountain barbarians.” If you’ve also read them, you’ll be familiar with other references, too.

The first fifty pages were hard for me to get into mostly because Hobb’s style is a little different in this one. Instead of focusing on one or two main characters, like in the Farseer books, Hobb deals with up to ten main characters and their interwoven storylines. Of course,  the Vestrit family plays a huge role in the story, but so do other characters.

My favorite characters are Brashen and Paragon, from the very beginning. There is no contest for my affections, honestly. Althea’s and Wintrow’s sections were good, as well, but I was drawn immediately to the relationship between Brashen and Paragon, and the information their interactions give the reader. I have high hopes for the characters, Brashen, Etta, Kennit, and even another liveship named Paragon. The Liveship Traders Trilogy is a very different one from the Farseer, though they take place in the same world. I see them colliding soon, but not before you get through The Rain Wild Chronicles and The Tawny Man Trilogy.

If you’ve read and enjoyed The Farseer Trilogy by Robin Hobb, you’ll like The Liveship Trader Trilogy too. If you’ve read George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, you’ll enjoy Robin Hobb (who also writes as Megan Lindholm, FYI). If you like fantasy at all, give Hobb a try. She’s fantastic and won’t disappoint.