Thursday, February 28, 2013

Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl



Warning: there may be some minor spoilers but 99% of this review is Kalinda’s perceptions of the book rather than rehashing of the story


The opening paragraph:

There were only two kinds of people in our town. “The stupid and the stuck,” my father had affectionately clarified our numbers. “The ones who are bound to stay or too dumb to go. Everyone else finds a way out.” There was no question which one he was, but I’d never had the courage to ask why.


Setting: Gatlin (fictional town in South Carolina), modern day USA

Key themes: Boy likes Girl (but Girl has a secret), aggressive small-mindedness and (in)tolerance of difference; Good and Evil and the grey spectrum in-between; fate vs free will; superpowered teens; sins of our parents; falling in love with mysterious strangers; aesthetic of the forbidden  

Kalinda’s Review

Protagonist and narration

This is the second book Kalinda’s recently read with a male protagonist – the other one is ‘Anna Dressed in Blood’ by Kendare Blake – and while Cas in ‘Anna…’ somehow manages to sound distinctively non-female to Kalinda’s ears (eyes), Ethan of Beautiful Creatures doesn’t exactly come off any different from a usual to YA female narrator. Should narration differ between female and male protagonists? Kalinda thinks yes, absolutely. How? That’s something for an author to convey and for a reader to judge.

Aside from the gender-related narration issues, the telling of this story was something Kalinda had troubles with throughout the book, and what a long book it was... And it’s not that Ethan was a bad narrator. He wasn’t. Yet, somehow he managed to be overtly descriptive whilst bland and, at times… boring. In the monotony that was Ethan there was no anxiety of (self)-discovery, no drama of falling in love for the first time, not much of an introspective contemplation… It was all too balanced to Kalinda’s liking. Ethan was perfect: he explained everything, dissected every single moment of his life (and the lives of others) to the bone… Maybe a third person’s POV would be better and added a bit of a mystery to the well-explained-world of Gatlin?

The characters

Aside from Ethan’s overbearing narration, the rest of characters weren’t particularly intriguing. Having seen the movie adaption of Beautiful Creatures now, Kalinda found that characters’ quirks and troubles were much better channeled on the big screen. Yes, while watching the movie she could totally see why Lena was going from cautiously excited to passive aggressive to outright aggressive in one agonising moment. She could see the reasons behind all the whining and the brooding. Unlike the movie which was surprisingly well done, the book didn’t really portray the characters’ woes and feelings that well.

Another issue Kalinda found with the characters was the lack of romantic chemistry between Ethan and Lena. The question Kalinda couldn’t help asking herself as she read Beautiful Creatures was why drag/force romance if it feels unnatural? Why push it? Perhaps, it would work better if the characters were just friends – wouldn’t it be interesting to explore the dynamics of male/female friendship in YA? It’s so very rare! Actually, come to think of it Kalinda can’t recall a single YA title lately where Girl and Boy are friends and nothing more. If you know of one, can you recommend it?

Major Motifs

The themes explored in Beautiful Creatures are among the best aspects of this book. The Us vs Them dichotomy, old as dirt but nonetheless interesting to ponder, is the backbone of this story and the authors return to it over and over again, sometimes elevating it to all sorts of extremes.

The small town setting in the Deep South where intellectual progress apparently is stunted still comes off fresh and peculiar enough to be intriguing. Although, while the numerous thick descriptions of Gatlin (architecture, atmosphere, small-minded ways of its inhabitants…) were well written and meticulously researched, Ethan’s looking-down gaze at his fellow Gatlinites was rather disconcerting. Such generalizations coming from Ethan made him look snobbish and a bit unlikable. 

Among the themes of this novel were also Palahniuk-esque explorations of one’s motifs for staying versus leaving, contemplating one’s desires to go away, (re)imagining your life and post-home future… It was all poetic and touching, beautifully done.

When The Mysterious Stranger comes to town, the atmosphere thickens with the fears of outsiders woven to shadow the excitement of something (or someone) new that Ethan feels, and deepened with self-discovery thrown into the mix.

Kalinda found this book binary at its core – light vs dark, xenophobia vs acceptance, staying vs leaving – the story kept going from one extreme to another. And then there were isolation and marginalisation of strangers and strangeness: the physical, social and emotional othering. It was all well done but the issue was that only the hero in his uniqueness alone appeared to be immune to the town’s growing hysteria born out of mistrust to strangers, only Ethan stood in between the bullying crowd and The Mysterious New Girl.    

The clichés

There was a haunted house on the hill, at times inhabited by Adams-esque characters; there were a storm-a-brewing and skies-are-churning; there was Birthright and of course there was someone who’s got way too much power for their own good that it would/should definitely blow up in their face (only it doesn’t).

Towards the end of the book Kalinda felt that only an amazingly twisted, earth-shattering ending could bring this book over from the realm of ‘It was Ok’ to stratosphere of ‘Wow’. Did the novel redeem itself with its ending? Unfortunately not. Maybe having just finished reading the first installment of Jenny Pox before starting Beautiful Creatures, Kalinda was expecting the ending a la Jenny (and not completely unfounded so – it certainly felt it was all building up towards something like that). But no, Beautiful Creatures is not that sort of book.

There were constant references to the greater literature and allusions to To Kill a Mockingbird; there was an abundance of tingling skin and brushing hands typical of YA lit but that could certainly be avoided as it has become a rather clichéd way to describe falling in love. In some way Beautiful Creatures felt like a YA ‘write–by-numbers’ with only a minimal tweaking, like gender role reversal. Ridley was the only character that intrigued Kalinda but since Ridley only appeared two or three times through the entire novel (the 500 pages of it), it wasn’t enough to redeem the book completely.  

Kalinda’s Verdict:
3-3.5 stars for decent writing and post-gothic feel. Read the book before watching the movie and compare the different endings.

Part of the reason (aside from all the movie buzz and the amazing Florence + the Machine song in the preview) Kalinda picked up this book was its enticing cover. Though upon reading Beautiful Creatures Kalinda can tell you that (and this is not a spoiler) the cover has nothing to do with the story – the dark and mysterious woods do not figure in it in any important shape or form.

The story attempts at magic realism (the characters take magical and strange things happening around them at its face value and nothing freaks them out. At all) but acquires unnaturally forced feel instead. Is it because we are all so desensitized by the abundance of paranormal in YA and non-YA books and movies that we are just expected to swallow up the characters of Beautiful Creatures behaving like they’ve seen it all when  faced with paranormal in real life? If yes, an author has to show it not tell it.