Review: Beautiful Creatures

Title: Beautiful Creatures
Author: Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl
Genre: Yong Adult
Series: Book 1 in The Caster Chronicles
Pages: 563
Release Date: December 1, 2009
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Summary: Is falling in love the beginning . . . or the end?

In Ethan Wate's hometown there lies the darkest of secrets . . .

There is a girl. Slowly, she pulled the hood from her head . . . Green eyes, black hair. Lena Duchannes.

There is a curse. On the Sixteenth Moon, the Sixteenth Year, the Book will take what it's been promised. And no one can stop it.

In the end, there is a grave.

Lena and Ethan become bound together by a deep, powerful love. But Lena is cursed and on her sixteenth birthday, her fate will be decided. Ethan never even saw it coming.(via Goodreads)

My Rating:

| Goodreads | Amazon | My Goodreads Review | 

This review was originally posted on my Goodreads, and may contain spoilers to this book. 

I picked this book up because I saw the trailer for the movie. Not because the trailer 'wow'd' me but because if it is good enough to be made into a movie I'm willing to give it a chance (plus I have seen so many books destroyed when they are made into movies that I do not judge books by their movies). To be honest, though, this book did not wow me. there were a lot of things that had potential but it just did not follow through. 

First of all it ended up being a romance, but the narrator is a male. This is something I found interesting because most of the times these type of books are from a female perspective. Second the actual basis for the plot was interesting, not the best I've read, but interesting non the less. Unfortunately I felt like it was not handled well. 

Overall I thought that it felt like another post-Twilight mess. (Please do not mistake me, I loved the Twilight series -minus the first book- but in the wake of Twilight's popularity there were a lot of books with basically the same plot put out and they are mostly a mess.)In fact I found myself seeing parallels to the Twilight series the entire way through. The main difference being that the role of Bella was filled by Ethan. 

Example: Ethan meets Lena who he is instantly drawn to. He cannot get him out of her head even though she insists that she is dangerous. He finds out he is a supernatural Caster(much like a witch) from a family of Casters who all have different gifts and who might hurt him, but accepts this overly easily. He doesn't care and they spend a short period of time together at their high school happy. Then a bad supernatural Caster comes along and tries to kill Ethan. Luckily Ethan’s Amma(?) is easily deceived even though she is constantly said to be very powerful. Ethan loses a fight with said villain and almost dies but luckily due to what Lena is she saves him. 

Which sounds a lot like:
Bella meets Edward who she is instantly drawn to. She cannot get him out of her head even though he insists that he is dangerous. She finds out he is a supernatural vampire from a family of vampires who all have different gifts and who might hurt her but accepts this overly easily. She doesn't care and they spend a short period of time together at their high school happy. Then a bad supernatural vampire comes along and tries to kill Bella. Luckily Bella’s well meaning father is easily deceived even though he is the Chief of Police. Bella loses a fight with said villain and almost dies but luckily due to what Edward is he saves her. 

It wasn’t bad enough that I will read the second book in the series, and the last few chapters were pretty good, but it was mostly a disappointment. 

What book did you feel got a lot of hype but ultimately fell short?