Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl

2 stars -- Meh.

I was disappointed with this book, but there's no real reason as to why. Beautiful Creatures has a beautiful cover, it's been recommended to me numerous times, I see it in prominent places. I feel like everyone has been telling me to read this book (though in reality I'm not sure anyone I know has read it), so I was really looking forward to reading it.

There's nothing inherently wrong with the book. The writing is done well. The plot is understandable. The characters are (for the most part) well developed. The problem I had with the book is that it sort of . . . well . . . dragged. It's 576 pages long and not much happens for the majority of the book.

I think the dragging most clearly shows up in the relationship between Ethan (the protagonist) and Lena (the love interest). About halfway through, Lena calls Ethan her boyfriend. One hundred pages later, Ethan wonders where they are in their relationship (despite having heard (and rejoiced about) Lena call him her boyfriend). Fifty pages later, he'll tell her he loves her, but then a few days later in the timeline, they're both freaking out about saying it to each other.

The dragging is also visible regarding Ethan's power (or lack thereof). Time and again it's shown that he has some sort of power, but time and again everyone denies it and let's him think he's purely mortal.

I realize that the authors have 150 days (plus) to cover, which I would like to applaud. Most of the time, YA is written with too much action packed into too little time (the characters manage to meet each other, kill a pack of werewolves, travel to Ireland to kill a coven of vampires, fall in love, fall in love so deeply they both give up their virginity, which makes them have a face-off with the devil, whom they then kill, all in 5 days?!), so I applaud the authors setting up a timeline that they follow. I also appreciate that the timeline allows time for true love to be believable and understandable. And I'm sure that on the authors' timeline chart, everything looked believable. "Day 25: Find out Amma and Macon know each other." "Day 67: Ethan's best friend's mother acts weird." In timeline format, it probably looked great. A little something occurred every day! But some times, the things occurring were such little things, and things were so drawn out and thought out in every detail, or even repeated (ie, the love story) that I thought, "Who cares?! We're past that!"

Now normally, for a book with so many positives and so little bad to say about it, I would give it 3 stars, but the more I think about this book (and I finished it over a week ago), the more I think I really don't want to read any sequels. There's a distaste to the book that sticks in my head. I can't really explain why, so feel free to read it and let me know what you think. There are plenty of good reviews on Amazon that tout this as an amazing book, so I may stand alone here. I'd love to hear your take on it.