From: Richie Partington <budnotbuddy>
Date: Thu, 9 Jul 2009 11:04:08 -0700

For younger Twilight fans:

Richie's Picks: BEAUTIFUL CREATURES by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl, Little Brown, October 2009, 640p., ISBN: 978-0-316-04267-3

"And I knew then it would be a life long thing but I didn't know that we We could break a silver lining."
-- Tori Amos, "A Sorta Fairytale"

"Gatlin wasn't like the small towns you saw in the movies, unless it was a movie from about fifty years ago. We were too far from Charleston to have a Starbucks or a McDonalds. All we had was a Dar- ee Keen, since the Gentrys were too cheap to buy all new letters when they bought the Dairy King. The library still had a card catalog, the high school still had chalkboards, and our community pool was Lake Moultrie, warm brown water and all. You could see a movie at the Cineplex about the same time it came out on DVD, but you had to hitch a ride over to Summerville, by the community college. The shops were on Main, the good houses were on River, and everyone else lived south of Route 9, where the pavement disintegrated into chunky concrete stubble -- terrible for walking, but perfect for throwing at angry possums, the meanest animals alive. You never saw that in the movies."

Welcome to Gatlin, South Carolina, the setting of a truly exceptional middle school romantic fantasy.

"Even if I hadn't seen her, I'd have known she was there because the hallway, which was usually crammed with people rushing to their lockers and trying to make it to class before the second bell, cleared out in a matter of seconds. Everyone actually stepped aside when she came down the hall. Like she was a rock star.
"Or a leper.
"But all I could see was a beautiful girl in a long gray dress, under a white track jacket with the word Munich sewn on it, and beat-up black Converse peeking out underneath. A girl who wore a long silver chain around her neck, with tons of stuff dangling from it -- a plastic ring from a bubble gum machine, a safety pin, and a bunch of other junk I was too far away to see. A girl who didn't look like she belonged in Gatlin. I couldn't take my eyes off her."

Thus it is that we catch our first real glimpse of Lena Duchannes, the girl who has been in Ethan Wate's reoccurring dreams from which he's been awakening with evidence (such as black mud under his fingernails) that his desperate dreams of trying to catch and hold onto a girl as they are both falling are actually real. Lena has just moved in with her reclusive uncle, Old Man Ravenwood who "made Boo Radley look like a social butterfly" and "lived in a run-down old house, on Gatlin's oldest and most infamous plantation."

It turns out that the smart, beautiful, and mysterious Lena, who drives around in her uncle's old hearse, is from a family of Casters. She is rapidly approaching her sixteenth birthday when she will be Claimed. Will she end up amongst the forces of the light or of the dark?

Ethan Wate, the story's teen narrator is still mourning the death of his brilliant, history-scholar-and-author mother in a car crash. Ethan has maintained a level of popularity as the result of his being a key member of the basketball team, but he is a reader and the son of educated parents, making him the odd one out in this backwater town filled with Confederate history, suspicion, superstition, and prejudice. He lives in the ancient Gatlin house that his family has occupied since before what the town's older inhabitants call "the War of Northern Aggression, as if somehow the North had baited the South into war over a bad bale of cotton." Ethan -- who is immediately head over heels when he meets the girl from his dreams with whom he clearly has some sort of powerful, otherworldly connection -- is being raised by Amma, the elderly, swamp-residing, tarot reading, crossword puzzle- playing Seer who also raised his writer father -- the father who has been effectively rendered immobile and has become reclusive in the wake of his wife's sudden passing.

Horror. History. Romance. Comedy. Magic. Prejudice, bullying, Marian the Librarian...and the DAR. It's all here in a 640+ page- turning story narrated by a teen guy -- a good guy -- whose educated mother brought him up right, and then died without sharing certain relevant secrets that are, in due course, revealed. Co-authors Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl have found themselves a perfect little crease between contemporary fiction and fantasy in which to create Ethan and Lena's story of love and danger and finding ones's self.

I loved being along for the ride as Lena's birthday approaches and Lena and Ethan repeatedly struggle to survive both the citizens of Gatlin and the underworld forces of darkness.

"Her eyes were clouding over like the sky. 'Can't we just enjoy the time we have left?' I felt the words for the first time.
"The time we had left.
"I couldn't lose her. I wouldn't. Just the thought of never being able to touch her again made me crazy. Crazier than losing all my friends. Crazier than being the least popular guy in school. Crazier than having Amma perpetually angry with me. Losing her was the worst thing I could imagine. Like I was falling, but this time I would definitely hit the ground.
"I thought about Ethan Carter Wate hitting the ground, the red blood in the field. The wind began to howl. It was time to go. 'Don't talk like that. We're going to find a way.'
"But even as I was saying it, I didn't know if I believed it."

Richie Partington, MLIS Richie's Picks http://www.librarything.com/catalog/richiespicks BudNotBuddy at aol.com Moderator,http://groups.yahoo.com/group/middle_school_lit/ http://www.myspace.com/richiespicks
Received on Thu 09 Jul 2009 01:04:08 PM CDT