Beautiful Creatures

Beautiful Creatures
Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl
563 pages
Publisher: Little, Brown
Source: library
★★★☆☆

You can read the Goodreads summary here.

The small Southern town of Gatlin is all a-stir when a new resident arrives in town: Lena Duchannes, the mysterious niece of the town's most mysterious resident.  Yes, she different than everyone else but the townspeople don't know that and they start a modern day witch-hunt against Lena.  Meanwhile, she can only muster up one friend - a boyfriend - Ethan.  Soon he, too, is pulled into her mysterious family history and a curse that haunts her female bloodline.

At first glance, it seemed like I would fall in love with this book; it had several appealing aspects to me: it takes place in the South on giant plantations, a guy and a gal fall in love but there are extenuating circumstances keeping them apart, and there's a somewhat unique paranormal aspect as well.  But, due in part to the busy holiday season and due in part to what I interpreted as a very slow start to the book, Beautiful Creatures failed to hold my attention until the last 250 pages or so.  That leaves a big chunk of the book that didn't hold my attention.

The last portion of the book was fantastic though.  It was fast paced and really drew me in.  For once, I actually felt invested in the story of Lena and Ethan and how her claiming was going to affect their relationship.  I was genuinely concerned about what was going to happen to them.

This is a trilogy, of course, so we can't know for sure what will really happen until the very end.  My library has the rest of the series and eventually I will be getting to them, but I can honestly say it's not at the top of my list right now.  The writing was great, as was the plot, but most of the book just dragged on too much for me.

If you have the time to devote to over 500 pages of paranormal romance, you might consider giving Beautiful Creatures a look.