Series: Caster Chronicles, book #1 Published: December 1st 2009
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Details: Hardcover, 563 pages
My rating: 2/5
My summary:
Tale of a human boy who meets a caster girl and falls in love. Even though well written, and funny and quirky at times (with great secondary characters), it was way too slow. And I didn’t feel the love between the main characters Ethan and Lena. I’m sorry to say it all fell flat for me and I won’t be continuing the series.
See my full review here:
Synopsis:
Lena Duchannes is unlike anyone the small Southern town of Gatlin has ever seen, and she’s struggling to conceal her power and a curse that has haunted her family for generations. But even within the overgrown gardens, murky swamps, and crumbling graveyards of the forgotten South, a secret cannot stay hidden forever.
My thoughts:
So I jumped on the bandwagon and got myself a copy of Beautiful Creatures, which was proclaimed to be the next Twilight.
I was hoping for another love story with paranormal elements that would blow me away. I’m sad to say that I wasn’t. I did however like the book. It wasn’t bad, but it was no page-turner either. In fact, I had no problem at all leaving it for a few weeks midway through, to read a couple of other books in between. Never a good sign.
The main flaw for me was that the love story did not feel real. The narrator Ethan keeps telling us how much in love he is with Lena, but I just didn’t believe it. It felt more to me that they came together because destiny had decided that. It was almost as if they didn’t really have any choice, and kind of just went along with it.
Maybe more room was needed for the romance to blossom into something real? As it was now, almost as soon as they met, weird stuff started happening and the story pretty much turned into solving the mystery of Lena’s curse, rather than of them falling in love. I don’t know, I’m just guessing here why the love story fell flat for me.
I also found the book too slow. The background of the curse of Lena’s sixteenth birthday is explained somewhere midway through the book. Then the seemingly endless wait for her birthday begins, and this wait essentially continues until the final pages. Not much happens in between – apart from lots of worrying and a fruitless search for a cure to Lena’s curse.
What I did like about the book though was the descriptions of the small town surroundings. The narrator’s voice is very likable as he describes all the people around him. The secondary characters are vivid and charming personalities and I found myself chuckle out loud quite a few times. So in that sense, I liked it, as it’s well written and witty.
But despite that, it is nowhere near comparable to Twilight. It’s definitely not as addictive, and I didn’t buy the romance. I enjoyed some parts of the book though, and some of the secondary characters, but not so much that I will continue the series.
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