The protagonist of the series is Ethan Wate, a sixteen year old boy. MTV News said the books were a series to watch out for. The series has been translated into over twenty-eight languages. It has been published in thirty-nine countries. Author Stohl once worked for Activision Games.
They were instant friends. They first intended the series to be six books long. They are both big science fiction and fantasy buffs.
Ethan Wate is living in small Southern town by the name of Gatlin. He wants to escape more than anything, but something is holding him back. Meanwhile Lena Duchannes, who Ethan has been unknowingly dreaming about, is struggling to hide her power and her family curse.
His mother died and his father is drifting away. She and her family are known as Casters- people with supernatural powers. The two start spending time together and are obviously in love.
Now Ethan must stay in the town he so desperately wanted to get away from previously in order to save the love of his life. Worse yet, Ethan is the only person who can truly save her. Lena has started to spend time with a different male, so Ethan takes the time to learn the deep secrets about the town of Gatlin. New and strange events are taking over the wild Southern town of Gatlin.
An apocalypse seems to be swarming down on Gatlin. One thing must be noted about this third book of the series: do NOT skip ahead to the ending. This is the last and final book in this fantasy, Southern gothic book series. Lena never accepted that Ethan was gone forever, and it turns out that she was right. If you thought the ending was impressive to the other three books, wait until you read the ending of this final book in the series. This book is worth the wait because it sums up the previous three books, yet the unique plot is unmistakable.
He drives to Ravenwood Manor and goes inside to find Lena lying on a table, with most of her family members standing around her. Lena is in pain, and her family is reciting a Latin chant to stop a spiritual attack on Lena by a Dark Caster named Sarafine. Ethan's presence seems to break the spell, and Macon's mother, Arelia, concludes that Ethan's love is the only force that can protect Lena from the schemes of Sarafine.
Amma uses magic to suspend time so she and Lena can talk to each other while the family sits by, frozen and unaware. Ethan can overhear their conversation, as Amma tells Lena that Sarafine is actually her mother. Ethan and Lena go to the Caster Library. In the library, they touch Genevieve's locket again and discover the source of the curse on the Duchannes family of Casters. Genevieve used the Book of Moons to work dark magic and bring Ethan Carter Wate back to life, and the Book gained the power to choose which of the Duchannes children would go Dark or Light in the future.
In the library, Lena faints and is again spiritually attacked by Sarafine, but she wakes up when Ethan kisses her. Ethan and Lena need to find the Book of Moons, and they think it might have been buried with Genevieve.
They go to Genevieve's grave and dig up the book. Then they study it to see if they can find a way to keep Lena from becoming Dark. At Gatlin High's winter formal, some of the girls ruin Lena's dress by pouring liquid soap on her and Ethan. Lena's cousin Ridley arrives at the formal and takes revenge for Lena's humiliation by mentally turning on the sprinkler system in the school.
The water ruins the dresses of all the girls who were mean to Lena, causing chaos. The mothers of the mean girls believe Lena is responsible for the incident, and they sign a petition to have Lena expelled from school. The school principal holds a hearing and is about to expel Lena when Macon arrives to protest the hearing. Lena is allowed to return to school. Over Christmas break, Ethan discovers that his reclusive father, Mitchell Wate , has not been working on his novel for the past several months.
He has been sitting in his study, grieving for his dead wife. In Mitchell's study, Ethan and Lena notice that several books are open to certain pages, and the pages refuse to be turned.
Some magical influence is spelling out a code in the books, and the message tells Lena, Claim yourself. Lena and Ethan continue to search through the Book of Moons, looking for a magical option that will allow Lena to choose her own fate.
The day of Lena's 16th birthday, Ethan goes to Ravenwood Manor to see her. Her extended family of Light Casters is with her. Lena is surprised when her Dark Caster cousin Ridley comes to the house with Ethan's best friend, Link, and several other students from the high school.
Ridley has put a verbal spell on the students who used to be mean to Lena so that they will treat her nicely on her birthday. Other students are setting up a big party for Lena in the field outside of Ravenwood. Macon forbids Lena to attend the party because of the potential dangers, but Lena sneaks out to enjoy the festivities anyway. Lena and Ethan dance together and finally say that they love each other. Ethan has to leave the party when he hears that his father, Mitchell, is standing on the balcony of a local museum, and appears as if he is going to jump.
Jul 10, Annalisa rated it it was ok Recommended to Annalisa by: Annie. Shelves: young-adult , fantasy , romance. From some of the reviews I've read, I was sure the writing was going to be atrocious. It's not. Sure there are times when it's repetitive and there's quite a few inconsistencies where someone would say or do something and then contradict it a few pages later and there were times when I had no idea what was going on like where Ethan maybe almost had a heartache I guess and I thought it was some psychedelic love scene until it was explained at the end , but there are also moments of brilliance, From some of the reviews I've read, I was sure the writing was going to be atrocious.
Sure there are times when it's repetitive and there's quite a few inconsistencies where someone would say or do something and then contradict it a few pages later and there were times when I had no idea what was going on like where Ethan maybe almost had a heartache I guess and I thought it was some psychedelic love scene until it was explained at the end , but there are also moments of brilliance, in writing.
The description was often vivid and I appreciate that it isn't uber-cheesy. In the beginning, I loved the setting of a Southern town and some of the quirky humor with which it was described. By halfway through though, I was sick of the over-stereotypical Southern town and over Garcia's and Stohl's mockery of it. I wish they hadn't wasted so much of the book making fun of the South.
Some issues I had with the book: 1. I didn't believe, not for one second, that Ethan was a guy. Forget a teenager which I didn't see either , there was nothing masculine about him. I can appreciate the lack of male protagonists in YA fiction, but if you're female writing a guy, you better make him more male than a guy would.
You can't make him distinguish the smell of rosemary and then go on for a page an a half about the dresses girls wear to dances and then all the decorations to the dance and make him overanalyze the behavior of the girl he likes. And you absolutely cannot make your protagonist disgusted that other guys appreciate a girl's body and want to distance yourself from such crude behavior. Whether you want to believe it or not, all guys notice those things, even the goody-goodies.
Guys have this thing about being one of the guys and blending in. They don't like to stand out. And if they do and if they're as well read as a college graduate who hangs out with his great aunts on the weekends , there is no way they would be popular. Even the way they described the way he packed away food sounded like the way girls are appalled that guys eat so much.
The only way I could read Ethan was as a personification of the authors as a teenage boy with all their girliness. I know that doesn't make sense either, but it worked for me, except for those moments when I was surprised to remember Ethan was a guy.
Sometimes he couldn't be anything but a girl. A few technicalities about guy things: Basketball. Centers aren't the stars of a basketball team. They don't get fouled every few second and they aren't the ones making the bulk of the shots.
Garcia and Stohl could have meant regular baskets instead of fouls and mis-worded, but even then a center wouldn't be shooting from the free throw line.
They're the big guys in the center who get shots off rebounds, not the ones dribbling up and down the court and making shots from the outside. And a guy who is on a sports team is ultra-dedicated to his team and the game and the season, especially if he's the star of the team.
Guys don't let girls get between them and their game or their friends like girls do. This was worded vaguely, but I got the impression that Link, who is a drummer, was the main vocals in his band.
Never going to happen. Lead singers are guitarist, bass players if you want, or just vocals, but not the guy in the back on the noisy drums setting the rhythm for the whole band. Like I said, it was vague and Link could have just been introducing the band, but I always wondered where the vocals were coming from when Ethan heard Sixteen Moons play on Lena's viola or anywhere that wasn't his iPod.
Mysterious, supernatural vocals. I had trouble suspending my disbelief in this one. When it opens with Ethan waking from a recurring nightmare and his reaction is "oh, there's mud on my bed again from my dream," it was a little jarring. I wanted him to freak out that his dreams were something more than dreams. I wanted him to freak out that someone could talk in his head.
I wanted him to freak out that all these weird supernatural stuff was going on around him. Not girl freak out, guy freak out. And if he's getting mud and water in his bed, why isn't snoopy Amma, queen of the superstitious, who is up in the night way too often realizing something is going on while he sleeps? Nobody really noticed how crazy their small town got. I wanted a reason to belief that all this crazy supernatural phenomena had been going on in the world and nobody noticed before.
It was too much. But my biggest issue with the supernatural elements is that I'm not a fan of black magic, not a fan of people with too much invincible power especially power that is hidden but obvious , and more than anything, I'm not a fan of stories where people don't have a choice whether they're good or evil our ability to chose is about the only thing we can control in our lives, without it, what are we but robotic extensions of someone else?
This book had all three, so while the suspense ended up being decent by the end after a lot of dragging , I wasn't crazy about where it was going. Speaking of freedom of choice, I never felt that Ethan and Lena fell in love. It was this sense of "oh, you're the girl from my dreams that I'm supposed to be madly in love with. You're hot; that's cool, let's be intensely, maddeningly in love beyond what mere mortals experience. They had already fallen irrevocably and eternally in love solely because they were destined to without ever getting to know each other.
And from then on, Ethan automatically understood everything Lena was thinking and feeling, which had nothing to do with the supernatural element. He just described her facial expressions or body language and told us exactly what was going on in her head. She may as well have been a secondary POV.
Which brings me to my next issue, writing issues. There were several instances where the authors tried to take something back or add something that should have been happening as an afterthought or most annoying made Ethan play the stupid girl to keep the suspense going. This is most frustrating in the climax scene where it takes four pages after Ethan realizes something is off to figure out what the rest of us already have.
I think we were supposed to be surprised by the revelation of who is waiting for them in the garden, but I don't see how you couldn't get it. And then Ethan makes this statement: "She had the power to destroy. I had only seen the power to love. All those broken windows and storms and pandemonium and he hadn't noticed the power to destroy?
What story was he in? Going into the climax, I was annoyed with the book and the characters who were just sitting around waiting for the climax. Before that, I kind of liked the book, but I got so frustrated with the stilting of Ethan and Lena's characters that I almost closed the book. If they don't care about their destiny, why should I? Time is running out and they have the book that maybe has the answers they're looking for and what do they do?
They go to a dance where Ethan describes the dresses and decorations. Pages and pages of a high school dance with doom waiting at the door. And then, they go to school and do homework and make out and take on the town and ignore the big clue given to them a hundred pages before the climax.
We're later told that they spent so much time pouring over the book that they're sick of it, but other than the one scene, I didn't see it. Even if they didn't get any answers, I wanted to see Ethan and Lena in a panic trying to stop the inevitable, not waiting around for it to show up. And I'm not even going to go into the tantrum Lena pulls on the big day. The authors wanted certain scenes in so they forced them on the characters and the story when they didn't fit. I think the book was too long and the details focused on the wrong things.
If it were an intense page-turner or the sexual tension powerful, then the pages would have flown by. But it read like a book that was pages. I can see why girls like the book, but not why anyone would give it 5 stars.
View all 15 comments. Nov 12, Lady Vigilante Feifei rated it really liked it Shelves: this-is-for-ana , i-trust-my-friends , sweet-hero , turtles-are-slow , dark-taboo-forbidden-reads , candyland-fantasy , boo-i-m-a-ghost-vamp-were-pnr , young-adult-ness , loved-the-movie. This is another one of those cases where watching the movie motivated me to read the book. Overall, I enjoyed this book immensely, and I found the two main characters to be endearing, down-to-earth teenagers just trying to find their way.
The pace of 4 stars!! And in his small hometown of Gatlin where secrets become common knowledge and unspoken agreements become law, Ethan wants nothing more than to escape this stifling place and explore the world.
What ensues is a tentative friendship turned relationship where the romance is pure and heartfelt. This book was such a delight to read. There is sarcasm and dry humor sprinkled among the pages, and with some Civil War history and family dynamics in the background, this book engaged both my mind and my heart.
I have a feeling that the following books will be just as good or even better than this first one. The ending is not a cliffhanger and concludes on a high note. View all 72 comments. It's not often that a book has me cringing, wanting to throw it down in frustration and never to return to it again. Unfortunately, Beautiful Creatures was written so badly and unconvincingly so that's what I would have done, if not for a reading challenge I was trying to complete.
You'd think such an interesting and unique premise about witches and warlocks would be difficult to get wrong. Unfortunately, the book was written in such a bland, boring manner that it failed to grab me at all. Not t It's not often that a book has me cringing, wanting to throw it down in frustration and never to return to it again.
Not to mention that some of the writing is just plain bad. It was contradictory, involved one too many broken sentences, and was rather confusing at times, making it a chore to understand what the author is trying to get at.
Unlike most YA books, it is written in the point of view of a teenage male, but the authors trying to put themselves in a teenage boy's shoes mostly involved talking about how hot some cheerleaders were at the school. There's barely any character development and you're just meant to accept that Ethan just falls in love with Lena, because he's been dreaming about her all of this time.
The plot or lack thereof just seemed to drag on and on forever. So much so that at the end, I wondered why I bothered wasting my time on reading this book when there are so many other more interesting things to do. Also at the most crucial moment when the plot is meant to take off, the authors throws us into a random, unimportant, and rather frustrating side track in the form of a surprise party.
Who cares about the other school kids when you are meant to be finding out what happens to Lena after ramping this up for the ENTIRE book? Save yourself the trouble, and skip this title. Check out Happy Indulgence for more reviews! View all 19 comments. Beautiful Creatures is one of those classic YA series that I somehow never got around to picking up until now.
I am so glad that I prioritized it this year because I ended up really enjoying it! I had previously seen and loved the film so I didn't go into it completely blind, but I'm happy to report that the story held up after all of these years. One of the most refreshing elements of the book is that it's told from Ethan the powerless mortal 's perspective. At the time, the majority of YA par Beautiful Creatures is one of those classic YA series that I somehow never got around to picking up until now.
At the time, the majority of YA paranormal and fantasy fiction were from female perspectives and the females weren't typically the powerful ones. It was really interesting to experience our narrator's helplessness as he's forced to react to the decisions of those around him instead of being the one faced with the tough choices. There's no doubt that the two reasons I enjoyed this book so much are 1 I found the Caster lore to be really interesting and 2 I loved the Southern Gothic setting.
I thought all the characters were well developed, and I especially loved Lena's uncle Macon. The one thing I wasn't totally sold on was the romance.
I did appreciate how focused Lena seemed to be on her future instead of pining after Ethan and so, I never felt a very strong connection between the two of them though I'm looking forward to seeing how it develops in the future installments. I also enjoyed the illustrations and that two of Amma's recipes are included at the end of the book. I'm definitely going to be making her cookie pie at some point! View 1 comment.
Mar 18, P rated it it was ok Shelves: young-adult. Beautiful Creatures sounds promising at first just like Twilight, a forbidden love story where two souls find each other in the darkest moment of their lives. But I didn't like Ethan, he's uninteresting and can't even deliver the story properly. That made this book so boring and I didn't want to continue around the half way through it. Anyway, I wanted to know about that little riddle about the curse and why everyone seems to be alerted by this cause, so I kept reading.
And I was doomed. I asked myself about why I read BC in the first place if view spoiler [the ending just goes back and meets the beginning again. For Lena, your power was very interesting but when you get involved with Ethan, it exactly goes downhill. I now understand why the movie isn't popular, because of many things being so messed up and unbelievably scattered.
No way. Even though I already bought the first three books, I feel like this is a bummer and I don't want to waste my time on this series anymore. Thank you! View all 23 comments. Apr 17, Melissa Marr rated it it was amazing. I devoured it. View all 4 comments. This was FUN! I vaguely remember seeing the movie many, many years back. Thinking the primes was awesome I got myself all four books; but never got around to reading them. Now I'm kind of glad it took me so long to get around to them.
I know, most people say the opposite thing, but I'm glad I can't recall everything form the movie, it made the book so much more interesting. I knew the ending, but all the other details were fussy, so this was kind of like a refresher - just way more detailed and so This was FUN!
I knew the ending, but all the other details were fussy, so this was kind of like a refresher - just way more detailed and so much better that the movie. I really enjoyed the narration - the fact that this book was written by two women and still the male protagonist was so true and realistic just blew me away!
The humor and the writing style was so addicting, I caught myself a few times mimicking the sarcasm. I must say this was an unexpected jewel. And quoting my friend Deedi : "Do not watch the movie!! Aug 23, Sandra rated it did not like it Shelves: rolling-my-eyes , someone-put-me-out-of-my-misery , young-adult , disappointments , horrible-bad-boring-beginnings , dragging-like-a-snail , why-am-i-bothering , bitch-don-t-even , omfg , paranormal-romance.
How the heck is this book turning into a movie?! It's slow and painful. But, before i'm gonna go all ballistic, and talk about how much i didn't enjoy reading Beautiful Creatures, i'm gonna say what this book is about for those who don't know.
So the main protagonist is Ethan, he dreams of this girl that he doesn't know more like has nightmares. Then one day he goes to school, and hears there is a How the heck is this book turning into a movie?! Then one day he goes to school, and hears there is a 'new hot chick', when he sees her, he somehow knows it's the girl from his dreams.
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